Butterfly Affair
by JMK758
Summary: The murder of a Navy Lieutenant launches the team on a new mystery where the only witness is an astonishing young woman. Can they solve the mystery in time? Deathfic? Don't spoil, please.
1. Butterflies are Free

This is my twelfth NCIS Mystery and the first of my Second Season. All the stories follow one progression, not counting non-Mysteries such as 'Abby's Night Out', 'Into the Light', 'Otherworld', 'Penalties', 'INCIS', 'Shepherd of the Lost', 'Game, Set and…' and others.  
The numerous 'Affairs' in my series are, of course, an Homage to Ducky, harkening back to his U.N.C.L.E. days. This series began on the Memorial Day Weekend of Season 4. It is now November.  
'Butterfly Affair' begins my Second Season and the back stories cover a progression related to the fourth Season of the televised Series.  
NCIS is owned and copyrighted by Belisarius Productions. I make no money on this and I'm not trying to take anything except Abby, Jennifer, Michelle and Ziva.  
Thank you to Zepherfox for Beta-reading this story. You have been a tremendous help.  
Please Review - but don't give away the surprises.  
Rating: T or NCis-17. Death, Intrigue and Mystery.

The Butterfly Affair  
By: JMK758  
Prologue

The rush hour traffic on Highway 395 on this brisk November morning is already poor and hardly improved when a large blue van rolls to a stop. Doing so in the left lane beside the concrete meridian forces all traffic behind it to a halt. Amid blaring horns and shouts lacking courtesy or kindness, the blocked cars attempt the difficult feat of merging with the middle lane.

The attitudes of the motorists improve immensely when the van's back door opens and a young woman climbs out. She walks back along the traffic, her gait unsteady. The fact that the tall, slim blonde woman is naked doesn't do much to hinder the already slow traffic, though she doesn't improve it either.

A driver pulling over in distress, even on the wrong side of the road, or a passenger leaving the vehicle to walk back along that side, doesn't usually cause much concern. The attraction she garners, however, is equally due to her nudity and to the wide spread of her large and colorful wings.

They span over six feet before closing again in the breeze, and as she passes drivers and pedestrians who look back can see that the upper or back surfaces are orange with black markings and ermine margins. The undersides, forward when extended to those she approaches, are rosy pink with black and white patterns and small, blue eyespots. It is this intricate side that is displayed to oncoming traffic as she walks unsteadily beside the concrete barrier.

Her passage only interrupts the already tedious merging, but she walks past one car after another, oblivious to their presence.

x

Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo is nearing the Navy Yard and already stressed at the tie-up, which has made him late and about to earn the second scathing reprimand in two days. However, his aggravation vanishes at the spectacle of the naked young woman approaching from several car lengths ahead. His attention to her body is then distracted by her colorful wings, which spread wide to either side, to brush a slow car on her left and the meridian on her right.

Tony closes his mouth but finds he can't do as much for his bulging eyes as the woman approaches in a barely controlled stagger. He hits his brakes as she reaches the front of his car, opens his door to block her and brings the traffic behind him to another full stop. The drivers in the cars before him continue the effort to merge lanes and rubberneck enough to risk whiplash while those behind him are simply out of luck. The horns that blare behind him are, he supposes, equal parts anger at being stopped again and frustration that he has interrupted the approach of the naked woman.

Close up, she appears to be about eighteen or nineteen, five foot nine and, so far as he may tell, a natural blonde. Unfortunately, he has only the hair on her head to go by to make this determination.

Getting out of his car, he turns his attention and gold shield on the irate drivers behind him. "Federal Agent! Honk again and I'll show you a new use for that horn!"

x

Seeing that no one seems inclined to challenge him, he turns his attention to the blonde butterfly on the other side of his door. "Don't move," he commands and she obeys instantly, freezing still. "Lady, just what do you think you're …?" He doesn't bother to finish, there's no point.

Not only does she answer; her eyes are vacant. Looking beyond her at the now bare stretch of road, he sees the open door of the blue van about sixty feet ahead. As the slow traffic resumes behind him, attempting to thread its way into the middle lane, he stops listening, not caring what the delayed drivers say.

As fascinating as this is, he discovers the surprises are far from over. The blonde woman is absolutely still. He'd told her not to move, she's absolutely obedient to this command, continuing to stare straight ahead, her eyes not even flickering. "Lady, just what do you think you're doing?"

Her pale blue eyes continue to stare straight ahead at nothing, her expression completely blank. "What's your name?" He realizes he might as well be invisible for all the effect he has on her, but then he recognizes that conclusion is wrong. He does have an effect upon her, just not in the way he had anticipated. She doesn't answer questions, but she does follow orders; he'd told her not to move, and beyond breathing she's virtually a statue. He peels off his brown jacket.

"Put this on." This brings her out of her paralysis, she reaches for the jacket but, there being no way that she'll be able to put his jacket on in the usual way, he aids her to pull it up her arms from the front and reaches behind her neck under her long blonde hair to snap the upper closure to hold the jacket against her chest. Since it's only long enough to hang midway to her hips and is useless from the back, it's little better than nothing. "Get back into your van."

Without any change of expression she turns around, he has to step back to avoid her wings, and they leave his car to walk the sixty feet to the blue van. DiNozzo ignores the blaring horns and more strident calls, doubting the woman is even aware that she's attracting attention.

His surprise thus far is overwhelmed as he inspects her back. From the rear the outstretched wings are an intricate mosaic of orange with black, bordered in black that's dotted with small white spots like ermine. He'd supposed that the wings were attached to her back, but finds they're grafted to her flesh. Her back shows lightened scar tissue surrounding the edges of where the wings had been inserted, showing that whatever had been done to her had healed some time ago. The wings extend slightly beyond the roadway meridian on the left, nearly out to traffic on her right, easily six feet. They also block him quite effectively from getting around her. "Hey lady, could you, you know, close the wings?"

She tightens her back muscles, shifts her shoulder blades, the wings close and he has to step back to avoid them. They appear as substantial as fine silk, almost translucent but independently colored on front and back. They're set into her flesh about eight inches apart, from the middle of her shoulder blades to the base of her rib cage and extend back some three and a half feet behind her. Now, however, he can come up beside her and escort her back to her vehicle.

x

When they reach the blue van the woman, without any orders from him, climbs onto the rear bumper and crawls into the enclosure, her closed wings just clear the top. DiNozzo realizes this is literal obedience of his order and very gratefully closes the door, sealing her from sight. Now there might be a chance of the morning rush hour traffic to return to normal – whatever that might be.

It's obvious from the first moment that the woman can't have driven the vehicle, so he steps up to the front, wondering where the driver has gone. It's then that he receives his next surprise.

The uniformed Navy Medical Corps Lieutenant hasn't left the van and he clearly will not do so under his own power, nor anything else ever again, not with his lower body, from stomach to feet, awash in blood. He's belted into place, his face and hands bloodless gray white, though his left hand upon his stomach, his lap and legs are covered with blood, and a pool of red blood has gathered on the seat between his legs.

DiNozzo looks into the back of the van at the naked butterfly, her body prone and motionless on blankets on the deck. Her back muscles are still bunched, holding the wings aloft, quite probably at considerable strain. "Oh, you can relax now." She does so, and her wings now extend to either side, each touching the side walls. DiNozzo pulls his cell phone out and presses a speed dial combination. He doesn't have long to wait.

/Gibbs./

"Hi, boss, I'm out on –"

/You're late, DiNozzo – _again_./

"I know I am, boss," he looks at the dead Lieutenant and the naked butterfly, "but this time I have a hell of an excuse."

Chapter One  
Butterflies are Free

Rush hour is officially over and traffic has cleared slightly by the time the Major Case Response and the Medical Examiner's vans make their way from the Navy Yard, up the Interstate and around to pull in behind DiNozzo's car. He had moved it behind the blue van but set flares more than a hundred yards back to make room for Gibbs' car and the vans to stop between his car and the closest flare. All five vehicles form a phalanx along the wrong side of the road.

He had also been frugal with information, mentioning only the late Lieutenant Arthur Cavaluzzi. That information had been obtained from the ID card in the man's left breast pocket, not requiring DiNozzo to search the body. As to the rest, he'd decided to save the best for last.

"At least this time you won't have to estimate a TOD," DiNozzo tells Ducky as the agents assemble near the driver side door to look in at the body. "He stopped the van at ten after eight. It doesn't even look like he made a move to take the belt off."

Wearing latex gloves, Gibbs carefully opens the door, touching as little of the control as physically possible. As the door swings wide McGee, having photographed the truck from several feet back, steps in between them to take some closer pictures of the body.

"Save some memory," DiNozzo advises from behind the rest of the team, "you're going to need it."

"Why?"

"Wait'll you get a look at the passenger."

They lean in to look behind the driver's seat as best they can and find an apparently naked woman, face down, partially covered by colorful– "Are those what I think they are?" Gibbs asks.

"Yep, wings."

Wanting a better view, not certain why he bothers to disbelieve anything anymore, Gibbs leads the others to the rear of the van and opens the door. The view is not that much more credible from this angle either.

"If you think that's something, watch this." DiNozzo is about to call her out, then reconsiders. "Boss, can we get a sheet from this door to my car?"

Looking at the astonishing woman, Gibbs doesn't want to cause another traffic jam. He nods curtly to Lee. Less than a minute later she returns with a large sheet they tie to the open door of the van and Tony's rear view mirror.

Then Tony looks into the van, his voice rises to a commanding tone. "Come out."

x

Boosting herself up onto hands and knees, the woman crawls backward out of the van, her appearance more startling and disturbing by the moment. The initial mixed reactions to the nude woman back-crawling toward them with this far less than modest display are overwhelmed when she steps down and remains facing into the van. Her wings, orange and black with ermine border in the back, extend more than three feet to either side of her. They reach several inches above her blonde head and halfway down her calves. DiNozzo's brown jacket covers her only in front as far as her hips, she's completely exposed otherwise.

Gibbs turns to Michelle. "Lee, get something to wrap around her."

"Right away, sir," the embarrassed woman hastens to obey, trying to hide her blush, ashamed not to have thought of it the first time.

"This is absolutely remarkable," Ducky muses as he looks closely at the woman's back, not touching her or the wings which flutter in the breeze.

Gibbs runs his fingertip along the soft, light material. "Feels like silk."

"Oh, definitely an artificial construct, in as much as silk might be considered to be 'artificial'. They are grafted into her flesh, you can see where the incisions have healed about them, leaving this white scarring all about," he indicates the line of discoloration that surrounds the edge of each wing base.

"How long ago?"

"I should say better than four months. One can tell the age of scars, which begin even under the best of conditions, from the various stages of healing, as the redness fades gradually at a predictable rate. This degree, notice the lightness, does not appear until at least four months, then it remains fixed for at least a year. Just using this as an indication, I can only tell you that she had surgery better than four, but less than twelve, months ago. I shall have to run far more detailed tests to narrow the range."

He pulls his attention from the fascinating appendages to the woman herself. She has not moved since she stepped down to the highway. "Has she been like this the whole time?"

"Totally oblivious," DiNozzo confirms. "She'll follow orders but doesn't answer questions. She walks unsteadily but I can't tell if she even knows we're here. She got out of the van when it stopped; I'm guessing he told her to. She started walking along the shoulder but it's just as lucky she didn't stroll into traffic."

McGee, unable to not notice the woman, also notices Ziva's eyes on his and tries to focus his attention anywhere else. It has been weeks since their relationship had exploded and the sting of his renewed relationship with Siobhan O'Mallory has, he knows, hurt Ziva deeply. He had never wanted it to, but since that time her attitude toward him has been only professional, cold and distant.

Michelle Lee steps in to tie a white body cloth about the woman's waist to fashion a makeshift skirt. The unknown woman shows no reaction at all, no awareness that she's being draped or indeed had been naked for so long.

"Get shots of those," Gibbs orders Tim, indicating where the wings join her flesh even as he steps around the front of the woman and leans in close, stares intently at her eyes and demands forcefully: "_Who are you_?" He receives not even a blink; then he treats her as a half-deaf Marine. "What's your _name_?" This more powerful inquiry meets with no more success and an even more forceful demand to know whether she can hear them has no effect at all. "What do you think, Ducky?"

"Too soon to give an estimate, I shall have to examine her. And I am not inclined at this point to remove Anthony's jacket to search for needle marks or any other indications of medical intervention."

Gibbs turns to DiNozzo. "I didn't look," the younger man admits. "I was more interested in getting her covered before we had a jam up all the way to Fairfax."

The Supervisor withholds any response, there is little more that can be done now. "McGee, unload the van. Ziva, Michelle, put her in and take her to Abby, have her start on blood work and see if you can ID her." As Michelle cautiously coaxes the woman to turn, her wings describe a wide arc and Gibbs fixes Ziva with a hard glare. "Drive carefully."

She only nods and refrains from pointing out that she is always careful.

x

The fascinating woman taken into care, the Investigators can return to more mundane duties. When Gibbs and Ducky return to the front of the van, they find that Jimmy Palmer has already performed the initial screening in the gathering of evidence. A probe inserted into the Navy Lieutenant's side shows a temperature of 97.8, he has been dead for about an hour, that information backed by DiNozzo's report. "There's less lividity than there should be," the Assistant Medical Examiner informs his mentor, "I found one wound in his stomach, a bullet went in below his navel, just over the buckle of his belt, probably through his liver. He looks to have bled out. The blood pooled in the seat and floorboards; everything else settled already in his buttocks and ankles."

"DiNozzo," Gibbs calls to where the man sketches the scene from the back of the van, providing an internal and external perspective on the last resting place of the late Lieutenant Cavaluzzi, "how fast was traffic moving?"

"I was doing a turtle crawl at 18 miles, but looking back it's a good thing I was late."

"How long could he live?" Gibbs asks Ducky, who examines the body closely.

"Well, such an injury to the stomach is not immediately fatal. If he had not gotten stuck in traffic and had gotten medical attention he could possibly have survived. I shall be able to tell you more once I get him on the table. But at a rough guess - and I do mean guess - I'd say about 20 to 25 minutes."

It's too soon to conclude that he could have made 6 to 8 miles on this road, but it does give Gibbs a starting point for his reconstruction. He looks about the cabin and finds a better indicator of the problem as he looks past Ducky's shoulder.

"Key's in the ignition, engine's engaged," he checks a few more readouts, "he's running on empty."

Ducky's expression, as he looks up, is grim. "In both senses."


	2. Painted Lady

Chapter Two  
Painted Lady

"Holy –!" Abby Sciuto is unable to select a suitable word to cover this surprising display as Michelle guides the young blonde woman into the Forensics Lab. Abby is dressed in a black tee shirt with the image of a winking skull and crossbones, the skull has a pink ribbon in its cranium. Black and red schoolgirl miniskirt and black fishnet stocking over high leather heels completes her outfit and she feels completely drab compared to the new arrival. "I don't believe this. I mean, you called and I was ready but I don't believe this."

The unknown visitor who wears DiNozzo's jacket backward and clipped about the back of her neck and a white cloth wrapped about her hips. She stands unmoving in the center of the lab and stares ahead at nothing. Abby guesses she is about seventeen or eighteen.

"Has she said anything?"

"Not a word," Michelle assures her. "The most response I get out of her is an occasional blink." Abby notes, as she steps around the motionless woman, that the orange and black wings have a black and white pattern on the front, while a rosy pink background with a blue eyespot accents the other side of each wing. They reach a height of several inches above the young woman's head and extend to her calves.

"She'll follow orders, but that's all. Watch," Michelle turns to the younger girl. "Close your wings."

The girl thrusts her shoulders back, bunches the muscles of her back, thrusts her chest forward. The colorful wings come together, extending backward over three feet and nearly toppling Abby's microscope. Abby regards the woman carefully. "Who'd ever think of Tony as the gallant type?"

"What kind of butterfly is she supposed to be?" Michelle asks.

"That, my friend, is a Vanessa cardui or 'Painted Lady' butterfly. Someone has a totally warped sense of humor." She turns to the young woman. "Well, let's see if I can find out who you are. Sorry, I need a blood sample, so …" she reaches under the girl's long blonde hair and undoes the collar snap of the jacket, eases the brown material down her arms and sets it aside, but then notices the stress of her muscles. "Oh, you can relax now." The girl doesn't move. Abby and Michelle exchange a curious look, Michelle gestures forward. "Relax," Abby commands. As the girl does so, the wings come out again to settle on either side of her, a span of over eighty inches.

Abby crosses the room to her supply cabinets and extracts the materials needed to obtain a blood sample, the hypodermic, tubes, elastic strap, antiseptic and swabs. But when she turns back she's annoyed to see Michelle is cupping the unresponsive girl's breasts in each hand. "Would you two like to get a room?"

"Just seeing, with what we've seen so far, what else was enhanced."

"And?"

"Nope. As far as I can tell I give her about a 35C, all natural."

"You scare me sometimes, Michelle."

"She scares _me_. She didn't respond to anything that happened all morning, not even to being touched just then." She waves her hand across the topless woman's eyes. "Nothing, not even a blink."

"Creepy. Come on, hold her arm up so I can take this blood, then I want you to use the fingerprint digitizer to download her prints into AIFIS." She pulls on latex gloves. "I need a couple of samples – then we find her a shirt."

x

"Look at this," Michelle says as soon as she takes the girl's left hand and raises her arm.

"I'm looking." In the bend of her arm is a blood smeared puncture, and several beside it that have healed. "Looks like a large bore, I'd say about a 14 to 16 gauge, they're generally used for IVs." There's a little blood smeared on the skin, still fresh enough to be only about two to three hours old. Abby touches the girl's forearm with her gloved finger and finds two spots where the skin is tacky. She takes DiNozzo's jacket from the table beside her, turns the right sleeve inside out and finds a small smear of blood. "Tony's not going to like this; he can't have this back until I'm done with it."

Actually she had intended to retain it until she completed a thorough examination, making certain she had collected every possible bit of evidence she could.

"I'm not sure he's going to want it back, but I hope you're not planning to check it like you did Special Agent McGee's new thousand dollar leather jacket." Abby had cut a large square hole in the left sleeve of that new jacket.

"Don't worry, I'm not mad at Tony." When McGee had finally come out and told her how much the jacket had cost, she had felt bad, though they had all been less than pleased to learn they had been turned into characters in a book without permission.

xxx

"A butterfly," Jennifer Shepherd says when Gibbs, standing before her desk, completes his report. "That's what I like about your team, Jethro, you bring me the best cases. Too bad, ever since the Hotel Maritz, so many of them are naked."

Gibbs refrains from pointing out that his budget doesn't include a line item for victims' wardrobe.

"How obvious was she?"

"Her, not much." She had been behind an improvised curtain, the meridian had blocked much of the traffic on the other side of the highway, then Lee had fashioned the improvised skirt. "The wings, oh yeah."

"Any chance of keeping this one out of the News? I don't want our clues coming from CNN.

Gibbs has never liked newshounds, but "I'll take them any way I can get them. We were out of there before any News vans could show up, but there was a lot of traffic," he continues sourly, "And I don't even think they _make_ phones without cameras anymore."

"I'll get the Media department on it; see if we can keep it off the morning news."

xxx

Gibbs enters Operations to find the team at work at their computers. "What have you got?" he asks Ziva, barely slowing on the way to his desk. The woman leaves her own, carrying a paper with her.

"I have Lieutenant Arthur Cavaluzzi, assigned to Quantico as a Physician for the past eleven years. I have a call in to his C.O. with a request for him to contact us via MTAC. I _also_ have an order in for a car to be gassed up and waiting."

Gibbs gives her an acknowledging nod, commending her foresight. He is not, however, quite ready to leave. "When was the last time he was seen there?"

"His duty shift ended 1600 yesterday."

"Where's our Jane Doe?"

"Lee has her down in Abby's lab, they're running tests."

He wonders what tests could require Lee's assistance, but he'll deal with that later. For now, she'd better come back with a detailed report. "Keep pulling everything you can on Cavaluzzi. DiNozzo, you running that license?" The glove compartment having been empty, he wants to be certain the van was Cavaluzzi's.

"Running; I'll have it in a few moments."

"McGee."

"I have Jane Doe's photo running against Missing Persons. That surgery to her back took quite some time to heal, Ducky says a couple of months."

"Four at least," Gibbs reminds them. Now comes the period he truly hates. All his agents are tracking down leads, Ducky is in Autopsy with Cavaluzzi, Abby is running tests on Jane Doe, a Forensics Team is taking the van apart piece by piece and it's far too early to hunt down any results. He turns to his own computer and he calls up any mentions of unusual skin grafts and surgical oddities.

When the page shows the first 10 of over 50,000 he wishes he'd left the weird stuff to Abby. He switches to backgrounding Cavaluzzi. At least Marine records make sense.

xx

It doesn't take long. The man's records are about as cut-and-dried as any Gibbs'd ever examined. He hopes the others have had better results. "DiNozzo."

"Yes, boss!" he answers with alacrity.

"Was that van Cavaluzzi's?"

"It was."

Gibbs has already looked up much of the man's Service Record, but he knows DiNozzo would not have limited himself to ownership of a car. He decides to see what the agent has turned up, and let him take the floor. "Tell us about him."

"He served for 11 years at Quantico in the Naval Medical Command, before then he was at Bethesda, prior to that at Johns Hopkins. There's not much in his record that jumps out, competent doctor, reasonable rise through the ranks." That much Gibbs knows all too well. "He married Lydia Carter in 2002, they have a 13 month old daughter Nicole. They live in the suburbs of Hopewell, northeast of Petersburg, Virginia."

This brings up one of the least agreeable aspects of NCIS duties, but the Agency does have Grief Counselors, so Field Agents do not always have to be the ones delivering the bad news. For the moment he'll hold off on contacting the new widow until he has some answers, then he'll start asking questions.

"Quite a commute to Quantico." Ziva observes.

"Some people like to get away from it all."

Gibbs wonders what Cavaluzzi was getting away from.

xx

The late Lt. Cavaluzzi has been moved to Autopsy, his uniform and personal effects removed and forwarded to the Forensics Lab. He has been X-rayed, weighed, measured, specimens taken from various parts of his body to check for the presence of anything that might answer how he had come to this lamentable condition. Seeing Ducky is ready to begin the Autopsy, Jimmy turns on the microcassette recorder and places it on the table where it will pick up the Medical Examiner's words for later transcription.

"Victim is identified as Arthur Cavaluzzi, a Lieutenant in the United States Navy, age 38, 5 foot 10 and 1/8 inches, 173.4 pounds. Apparent cause of death is exsanguination from one puncture wound to his abdomen, three point five inches above his navel." Then Ducky stops and looks up at the tall man on the other side of the silver table, "Mr. Palmer, how long have you been my assistant?"

"Er," caught off guard by the unexpected question, it takes Jimmy a few moments to answer, "a little short of three years, Doctor."

"And in that time, how many autopsies have you assisted at?"

"Too many." This causes Ducky to smile before he reverses the scalpel in his hand and extends it to the young man. "You want me to do this?" Palmer asks, astounded.

"You have shown yourself to be quite accomplished as an assistant, let us see how you fare as an examiner. Mr. Palmer, Lieutenant Cavaluzzi is all yours."

x

Jimmy takes the scalpel, feeling quite shaken. He wants very much to show his teacher that he's competent, so he puts on his very best confident manner. "Let's see…" he's about to begin, but with Cavaluzzi's head to his right he's on the wrong side to work right handed. "May I?" he asks, indicating the other side of the table.

"Oh, be my guest." They trade places; the seconds bought allow Jimmy time to prepare.

"Well, let's see." He inserts the thin end of a probe into the bullet hole in Cavaluzzi's lower abdomen and addresses the still running recorder. "The wound depth is … 11.79 inches, probe encounters a solid mass." He withdraws the silver implement and sets it aside on the table. Taking a long swab, he inserts the cotton into the wound and withdraws it. The cotton is saturated with blood which also shows indications of congealing and separating into its component parts. He records these observations as he goes, placing the blood and serum soaked swab into a plastic tube, then these into an evidence bag, the number of which he announces for the taped record, and then uses another probe more cautiously, swabbing only the uppermost inch of the wound. He secures this swab as well, marking each appropriately.

Through all of this, Ducky observes quietly, contributing neither direction nor comment.

x

Jimmy takes the scalpel and makes two incisions from shoulders to just above the breastbone, then a long incision from that point to the groin, taking care to miss the wound. Cutting back the flesh to bare the protecting bones, he next uses a set of heavy cutters to slice away the rib cage and sternum. He removes them and sets them into the bin at the head of the table.

"The bullet has penetrated the right rectus abdominis, damaging the large intestine, pancreas and kidney. Absence of stippling on clothing or flesh and the small bore of the wound indicates the weapon was fired at a range of …" he looks up at his mentor, "twenty feet?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

Jimmy considers, he has been placed in charge. He looks at the recorder on the table beside him. "Preliminary indications are that the weapon was fired from ten or more feet away."

"Very good, Mr. Palmer. Even in a preliminary examination such as this, it is important to avoid drawing too many conclusions. Conclusions such as might be drawn await more detailed investigation and corroboration."

"Yes, Doctor."

"Please continue."

"Yes, Doctor." The heart and lungs are removed en bloc, then each internal organ in turn is removed, evaluated, weighed, measured and placed into a bin at the head of the table until its eventual return to the body, all details recorded for posterity. In due time Jimmy works his way down to the bullet and draws it out with a pair of toothed forceps. "A .44?" he asks, examining the blunted and blood covered metal.

"Once again, are you asking or telling me?"

"Neither," he decides. Ducky holds up a cotton-padded, clear plastic jar, Jimmy drops the bullet into it and then removes his gloves and tosses them into the waste bin beside the table. Taking the jar, he seals it into a plastic Evidence bag, seals and signs it. He then holds the bags out to his mentor. "To Abby, if you please."

Ducky grins at the familiar tone to the words. "Right away, Doctor."

x

Ducky is about to board the elevator when the doors part and Michelle Lee steps out and almost collides with him. "Oh, Doctor Mallard, I'm sorry!"

"That's quite all right, my dear, I wasn't expecting you either." He quickly realizes his humor has only flustered the young woman more. "What may I do for you?" he asks as he escorts her back into the Autopsy suite, catching sight of his assistant's eyes as he sees the woman.

"We need something for the, ah, butterfly. I was, um, wondering if I might borrow a set of old scrubs? Actually, not an old – I mean 'borrow' isn't exactly the right word. I'm, er, going to have to … you know … cut them up?"

Ducky has never known anyone so apologetic over the imminent destruction of disposable garments. "Think nothing of it, my dear, I quite understand. Mr. Palmer, if you please?"

"Of course, Doctor," he goes to the supply room, removes from a shelf a pair of his own blue scrubs, guessing the longer size will be more useful. He brings the folded garments out and hands them to Michelle. Their eyes and hands meet for a lingering moment.

Ducky lets them have that moment, but "I was actually on my way to Abby's lab, I'll ride up with you. I want to examine the young lady. How is she?"

"Scary."

"Oh?" this is a surprise, "in what way?"

"She's like a robot. She follows orders but it's like there's no one home."

"Well," he says as they approach the sliding doors, "let us see what we can. Mr. Palmer, if you would be so good as to continue? See what our Lieutenant has to tell us."

"I'll be sure to ask," he assures them with a grin.

xx

Ducky waits discreetly outside the Lab while Abby and Michelle prepare their charge for her examination. A competent doctor of the living as well as examiner of the dead, he is routinely called upon to render services to both. Even though Michelle had said the patient is unaware of her surroundings, he gives due regard for her sensitivities and the hope that she will, hopefully sooner rather than later, be lucid. Therefore he waits patiently in the main lab for the women to return from Abby's office.

When they enter he finds that the blonde beauty has been suitably outfitted in a set of Palmer's long blue scrubs. The back of the shirt has been sliced from hem nearly to the shoulders in two vertical cuts so that it might clear the impressive wings. The plainness of the green/blue material is in sharp contrast to the bright colors of her wings.

"I must say," he tells the motionless young woman, "I have never had a more remarkable patient." He steps behind her and gathers the center strip of material so he may examine her flesh where the artificial wings are grafted into her back. "I will need to take x-rays, find out how these have been attached and how you manipulate them. I would prefer to do it before you are lucid."

"Is she going to recover?" Michelle asks, concerned.

"Oh, I'm confident that she will. We await only word from you as to what placed her in this diabolical condition, thence we shall see about a cure."

"I took blood and some of her hair," Abby tells him, "I'm also running her prints through AIFIS. I should have an ID soon, hopefully before Gibbs calls for one."

"Then let us be off. Oh, I almost forgot," he picks up from the long white table the set of Evidence bags he'd brought, "Mr. Palmer sent these up for you."

"Palmer?"

Ducky explains his purpose in seeing how much his younger charge has learned, so he may know in the best possible manner how his assistant has progressed as a Medical Examiner.

Abby takes and signs the plastic evidence bags, addressing the venerable man as she would Jimmy. "Great. Now go on, get out of here and let me work."

xxx

"Where is she, Abby?" Gibbs asks less than a half hour later as he strides into the lab, holding in one hand a large coffee cup, in the other a larger 'Caf-Pow!' container. The woman turns from her mass spectrometer, closing its door.

"Ducky brought her downstairs for some x-rays and other tests, to give me a chance to go over what I can before the van gets here. I asked Michelle to stay with her, to let us know when she comes out of whatever they have her under." Some of what is on Gibbs' mind shows in his face. "I figured a woman should stay with her, and between Michelle and Ziva, Michelle's be the best choice. Between Ducky, Jimmy, you, Tim and Tony, I didn't want her to wake up in a strange place and choke on all the testosterone."

He doesn't answer her baiting smile. "Fine."

"Ducky brought me up a bullet a little while ago."

"Ducky?" he should be deep into the Autopsy, or Jane Doe's X-rays, at this point, "don't you mean Palmer?"

"Nope, they've got a role reversal thing going on downstairs, apparently Jimmy's in charge. Ducky wants to see how much he's learned."

"So what did _you_ learn?" he hands her the 'Caf-Pow!'.

She takes a mighty draw and declares, "Role reversal doesn't work so well when you work alone."

x

She reads in his stare that she's used up all the leeway she's going to get. "While the bullet is from your standard .44 caliber handgun, you'll find this type used mostly in a Smith and Wesson. There was no impact with any bones, a lucky shot for me because all it went through was soft tissue so I got some good rifling. It didn't turn up on the FBI or ATF databases, meaning it hasn't been used in a crime _that we know of_, but that only says a little. You get me the gun; I'll get you a match."

"What are those wings made of?"

"Silk, really high grade stuff," she indicates the microscope beside her. "I got a sample of it." He looks into the unit, not seeing much to enlighten him, so he leaves it for her. "The wings are supported by a frame of aluminum with titanium sheathing."

"Interesting combination."

"Light but resilient, they won't bend easily but she can hold them up without getting exhausted. I won't say they won't hurt like hell, particularly in a stiff breeze, but she should be okay as long as she doesn't damage them."

"What else have you got?"

"I'm running her prints through AIFIS, but so far no hits. Ditto on facial recognition."

"I stood in a surveillance van just a couple of months ago and watched your wireless doohicky get hit after hit in seconds."

"That was different."

"How so?"

"Those were men, a lot older than she is though I wouldn't call most of them mature. Some were ex-Servicemen, some had records, some got fingerprinted for their jobs; the bottom line is they were in the system. She looks to be about seventeen or eighteen, and if she was a good girl her prints might never have been taken at all. You're printed for some jobs, if you get a Visa, if you're in the Service, if you get busted. The only reason _I'm_ in the system, other than joining NCIS, is that I got caught topless at a Rock Concert. Why they wanted my _finger_prints I'll never know," she catches his look, knows that she has completely run out of latitude. "I'll call you when I get a match on the prints or facial." She's interrupted by a 'ping' from a monitor at her main workstation, turns about and announces, "I've got a match."

x

Keeping up with Abby's Warp Nine presentations is a challenge at the best of times. At first Gibbs glances at the AIFIS computer, but it is still scanning, so he looks about the lab for the source of the signal, which turns out to be from the spectrometer.

"Match for what?" He looks at the spiked lines of the graph on the computer screen and doesn't even try to figure them out. She may be able to interpret the spikes, valleys, percentages and Latin chemicals displayed on the screen, but to him they're indecipherable gibberish. He waits, with diminishing patience, while she manipulates the results, scanning several almost identical screens. The only difference he can see between them is sample numbers, which run an ascending order from 19 to 25. Just as his patience is exhausted she turns, a self-satisfied smile on her lips.

"Flunitrazepam."

She doesn't elaborate. "What the hell is Funitrasipam?"

She starts to smile but pulls it back. She'd never considered this drug anything to smile about. "You probably know it as Rohypnol and a whole list of street names," she tells him. "The most common one is 'roofie'. It's a nitrobenzodiazepine, stronger than nitrazepam and clonazepam and 7 to 10 times as powerful as diazepam. It enhances GABA at the GABAA receptor, takes effect twenty minutes after ingestion, peaks in four to six hours but stays active in the system for twelve or more hours. You can also dissolve it into an IV solution, which is what I'm betting they did with her. Not to get too technical–"

"When do you not?" he asks, mentally reeling from those two long breaths.

"Come on, Gibbs, I also explain, which puts me a rung up on some other scientists."

"Appreciated."

"Flunitrazepam is one of a class of drug known as Bensodiazepines. They bind to glial cell membranes and can inhibit the effects on plasma cholinesterase by anywhere from 60 to 90 percent. They're sedatives, so they work in muscle relaxation, reduce anxiety and prevent convulsions. Normally it will make her light headed, giddy, compliant, very responsive to suggestion. It's meant for a one-shot, sort of 'bang and run', not for long term exposure." Aggravation clouds her tone. "Obviously we're seeing the result of that long term exposure. She's not giddy, she's an automaton!"

"Abby," he feels he has to rein her in.

"I'm sorry, Gibbs, I'm usually a happy camper but if there is one thing that really pisses me off it's things like this. This is a 'date rape' drug and a particularly devious one at that. It's _so_ banned here in the States that possession of even an ounce can get you twenty years but I opt for thirty for a milligram." She tries very hard not to sound exasperated, tries to push back her aggravation and recapture her normal joie de vivre. Exasperation is a Gibbs trait, not a Sciuto one, at least so she reminds herself. "It was in a hair I took from Jane Butterfly."

"Jane Butterfly?"

"Come on, Gibbs, she's not a deer."

"What is Rohyp – what's it doing in her _hair_?" He refuses to entertain the notion that they – whoever _they_ are – were making her shampoo with it.

x

She won't make the mistake of sounding exasperated at the level of his scientific acumen. "Gibbs, human hair is alive; that is, the follicle at the end is, that's the 'root' that the hair grows from. That is," she looks pointedly at his Marine length haircut, "for those of us who actually _allow_ it to grow. Blood carries everything in it around the body, including heavy molecules," she continues without a break, not allowing him a moment to respond. "They get into the follicle, then the hair that grows from it. Hair grows about an average of one half inch per month. I took samples of every half inch of one of her hairs. My first hit is sample 19, that's three and a half inches from the follicle, and there's not much change in the later samples. Number 25 is at the follicle. Do the math: they've been pumping this stuff into her for seven _months_."

This is helpful to narrow the 'Missing Person' search. "How long does it last?"

"Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news, they seem to have been careful about dosage, you can kill with an overdose and it's a really nasty way to go. A safe dose is only 1 milligram and is effective for 8 to 12 hours, more so than the usual stuff on the streets, then she'll come out of it. That's why they obviously kept dosing her for seven _fuc_ – seven months."

"How long does it last?" If he has to repeat himself again…

"The main effects, 8 to 12 hours, but the aftereffects can persist up to about 200 hours in some cases."

"And when it wears off, she'll be able to tell us who did this to her?"

x

"Sorry, Gibbs, that's the bad news. Remember I told you it's one of the popular 'date rape' drugs, which is why you can't get it here. Roche took 5 and 2 mg doses off the market years ago, but it's still available in Mexico and other countries in 1 mg doses. It's currently a Schedule III drug but it's under review to make it a Schedule I in the US; it's that dangerous.

"It plays havoc with the memory; you can't form any new memories while under its influence. That's what's known as 'anterograde amnesia', she'll remember up until being drugged and you might get something out of her. She'll remember everything that happens to her _after_ it wears off, but during – this thing blasts the neurons. Everything that happened under the influence will be a total blank. Her memories of just before being drugged might be fuzzy too."

"So we might get nothing from her?" That's a grim prospect indeed.

"Hard to tell until it happens. She may know what was happening to her, she may have some memory of things happening between one dose wearing off and the next being administered, which would be good. I wouldn't count on anything but fragments, if you even get that much. If she comes out of it and isn't expecting the wings, she's probably going to _freak_. Then again, that's not the worst."

"Okay," he hates to ask, "give me the worst."

"Well, assuming she does freak out, you're going to have to get her calmed down, and very shortly after that she's going to be going into withdrawal. Give it a day if she's lucky, less if she's become so physically dependant that she can't hold out without it."

She is especially unhappy with the look on Gibbs' face. "Come on, Gibbs, they've been keeping her high nonstop for seven _months_! It's a wonder she's even _alive_, let alone walking around. Flunitrazepan is intended as a _short_ term sleep aid, one of the most powerful ones there is, prescribed when all else fails. When it wears off she'll suffer seizures, psychosis, severe anxiety and equally severe insomnia. It reduces the delta wave activity in the brain so, when you stop it, it's going to rebound on her. She should be weaned off it, but I don't have the facilities. She should be in the hospital."

"She's our only witness."

"Then you'd better get what you can from her in the awfully small window she'll have between freaking out and withdrawal, because once she starts with the vomiting and seizures and psychosis, she's not going to be up to answering any questions."


	3. Mr Palmer, you are not finished

Chapter Three  
Mr. Palmer, you are not finished

"What have you got for me, Ducky?" Gibbs asks as he strides into Autopsy, amazed at how those few words consistently make him feel better. He has to admit they probably don't do as much for his friend.

Not everything Abby had told him about the prospects for the future was grim. There is the chance, as in other cases of amnesia, that 'Jane Butterfly's' memories might return. They might do so sporadically, over a short or long period; gradually, or in a burst of awareness. But there will be a very short period before the aftereffects hit her; he has that long to learn everything he can.

Now he needs to see what the other team has.

At the moment, Ducky and Jimmy are on either side of the brightly lit silver table, their faces protected by curved plastic shields that tend to distort their voices in a very annoying manner.

Dr. Arthur Cavaluzzi lies with his torso widely spread, half of his internal organs already removed, weighed and inspected. They now rest in a bin at the head of the table, awaiting eventual return to their proper places. To Gibbs, it has always resembled a gruesome jigsaw puzzle considerably worse than the 'meat puzzles' they have occasionally been forced to contend with.

"Me, I have nothing for you," Ducky denies as he looks up and addresses him through the clear plastic shield protecting his face. He is on the wrong side of the table. "You shall have to speak to the Medical Examiner on this one."

Jimmy Palmer looks up from Cavaluzzi's intestine, his face filled with horror.

"You have done the easy work, my boy," Ducky admonishes him, "but there are still hardships we must all endure."

"Yes, Doctor." He resigns himself to the inevitable, even though it had been seasoned with a little shared humor at the Investigator's expense. He hands over the implements he'd been holding, straightens and turns to face the hardship. Ducky leaves his side of the table and steps over to the backlit panels on the far wall, upon which several x-ray photographic images are clipped.

"The, er, that is," Jimmy pulls himself to a hard stop, knowing it will do nothing for his success as a Medical Examiner if he cannot articulate what he's learned. "Lieutenant Cavaluzzi was shot once in the solar plexus and the bullet penetrated the right rectus abdominis. Death was due to exsanguination secondary to a penetrating abdominal gunshot wound with perforation of the artery." The hard glare on the Investigator's face reminds him that the technical language he'd employed with Ducky isn't best used now. Jimmy shuts himself up, pulls off his latex gloves and tosses them into the bin at his side. "He was shot in the liver. The liver is so vascular that the bleeding was profuse; he probably bled out within about twenty to twenty five minutes."

"Anything else?"

"There was something on his right palm. I've collected samples to send up to Abby. She already has his uniform."

"What sort of something?"

"I'm, er, not sure."

"All right."

x

Gibbs turns his attention to the other man standing near the lighted panels, trying not to think of him as 'the real ME.'. On the black sheets attached to the panels are white skeletal representations of 'Jane Butterfly's' shoulders, arms, ribs and spine, as well as other things far less common. He looks the pictures over closely, not certain what to make of the extra parts displayed upon them. "What am I looking at?"

Ducky looks past him to his assistant. "Mister Palmer?" Jimmy turns around. "You are not finished."

"But you – that is, I – you took the …" Under the stern gazes of the older men, he says a quick prayer, devoutly hopes someone is listening, and crosses the room to the panels. Attentive as he had been to his own responsibilities, he has not done more than peruse the images of the young woman while they were being put up. Now he studies them as quickly as he can, feeling as though he's cramming for a Final Exam a moment before the test is placed in front of him.

Ducky, rather than being a supporting presence, steps behind him out of sight, leaving him to Gibbs' mercy.

"Well, er, let's see… the, er, wings are attached to the shoulder blades at top and bottom, and then anchored to each of the twelve pair of ribs. They will be able to be manipulated by the muscles in her back, which healed around them. I'm, er, not sure what they used to anchor them."

"How long would it take?"

"She's almost completely healed, from what I could see. Six, maybe seven months?" "Where is she now?"

"She's with 'Chelle." He realizes too late that so brief an answer was not the best. "That is, we asked Special Agent Lee to take her down to the Holding Cell and stay with her. There's, um, a camera there that you can monitor her from your Squad room and you already know that…. Doctor Mallard didn't think it was a good idea for her to wake up in Autopsy."

"I thought you were 'in charge' today."

"Well, that is, I agreed. With everything she went through, Autopsy's not the best place for her."

x

"What _did_ she go through?"

"Well," he hates to speculate; Dr. Mallard has already admonished him about this, "Abby called down just before you got here, told us Jane Butterfly–"

"Jane _who_?" he challenges.

"Er, that's what Abby called her, said she's not a–"

"Deer, I know." How quickly bad ideas get around NCIS.

"Anyway, she said it looks like they had her on an IV of Flunitrazepam – that's a 'date rape' drug."

"Really." His tone is as bland as he may make it; it doesn't dissuade the man from continuing.

"Yes, you can dissolve or break up a 1mg tablet into water, any drink or food, and an IV solution would be just as good. Within twenty minutes the victim may become tipsy, giddy, she'll be compliant, completely susceptible to suggestion, but she would look and act normal. You can talk her into, or order her to do, absolutely anything. It also plays havoc with the memory; she can't form new memories, you see. As long as she's drugged she won't remember a thing, and even memory from just before she was drugged might be spotty. You can do anything you want; she'll never remember anything afterwards. And if her memory does come back it'll be spotty, fragmented and it could take hours, days, weeks, months or never. They probably drugged her, did all this and knew she wouldn't resist nor remember anything afterwards, no way to ID them."

"So you think that's how they did it?"

He considers carefully, finding no flaw in his reconstruction. Doctor Mallard had warned him about speculating, but when asked a specific question, "That's how I'd do it."

Gibbs turns from the x-rays to the young man. "You would?"

Jimmy considers one more time. Is there any gap in his logic? "Yes."

"I'd better warn Lee."

"_NO_!" Jimmy is horrified, "that's not what I – I'd nev – we don't – I'm not like – I didn't mean I – I mean I don't – I –!" he turns to Ducky, desperately seeking understanding and support. "I _don't_!"

Far from that support he had counted upon, he finds his Mentor grinning at him instead, and looks back to find Gibbs' smile only slightly less broad.

"Good job," the agent says and turns to leave. He'll go down to the Holding Cell to see 'Jane Butterfly's' condition for himself.

Jimmy turns back to Ducky. "I _don't_!"

xxx

Gibbs considers, even as he heads down to the sub-basement near the shooting range, what his next course of action is to be after he sees the young woman, deciding just before he arrives. Given the choice between interviewing Cavaluzzi's C.O. and coworkers at Quantico or the Lieutenant's family, he decides that he will get far better answers on anything unusual by visiting the wife.

When Gibbs lets himself into the holding cell, he finds the two young women seated on chairs, the blue scrubs clad 'butterfly' facing him. Michelle is seated in front of her, speaking softly, but when the door opens she turns and jumps to her feet.

"At ease," he tells the startled woman.

"I wasn't – that is – thank you, sir."

She is the only one who he allows to call him 'sir', mostly because in the months he's known her he has never broken her of the habit. Considering her initial constant use of his full title with the honorific, this is a better alternative and he's given up trying. "How is she?"

"I think she's coming out of it. She still doesn't move, but there's more … awareness in her eyes. She also moves them a little, tracks me for a second when I move, but it's a slow, uphill battle."

He bends down, looking closely into the woman's pale blue eyes. They're not as motionless as they were before. He now sees the tiny, unconscious flickers of movement that had been absent before.

"All right," he straightens and turns to the agent, "you keep close tabs on her, the moment you see her coming out of it you call Ducky and Abby. I want them here to help. We're going out to Cavaluzzi's place."

xxx

When Gibbs' blue charger eases to a stop in front of the blue and white one story home outside Hopewell, Virginia, the black and white Crime Scene van behind it, the four agents find they're not alone in wanting to see Mrs. Cavaluzzi. A woman wearing a white dress under a black jacket knocks on the front door with increasing sharpness. "Lydia," she calls, "open the door. Please!" She knocks harder still as Gibbs leads his team cross the yard. Within the house they can hear a baby's strident screams. "Come on, Lydia, what's going on in there? What's wrong?"

"I was hoping you could tell us," Gibbs says from three feet behind the woman, startling her so she turns quickly. She's about 40, five foot seven, short curly black hair, her brown eyes wide with concern newly tinged with fright.

"NCIS?" Her surprise mounts as she looks at the four Federal Agents who have seemingly appeared out of nowhere in response to a franticly crying baby. She knows of the Agency from Lydia even if she didn't see the gold emblems on their black jackets and doesn't bother to ask why they are behind her. "I can't get her to answer, and Nikki has been crying for twenty minutes. She's usually so quiet and–"

Gibbs hits the door considerably harder than the woman had, his voice far more penetrating. "Lydia Cavaluzzi, NCIS, open the door!" The force of his command only increases the volume of the crying within.

He glances at the windows; they're all closed and covered by white drapes, preventing any view of the interior. He has no desire to damage the door of a potential crime scene. "Do you have a key?"

"No."

"Ziva." Of all of them, Ziva David averages the fastest time with a set of lock picks. She crouches by the door and in less than ten seconds Gibbs turns the knob and admits them into the house.

The living room is large and spaciously appointed. A plasma screen is mounted on the far wall over an extensive stereo system; a couch on the near wall to their left is set under the bay window. There are two blue leather recliners set perpendicular to either side of the couch, the far one toppled onto its back. Nikki Cavaluzzi is in a playpen in the center of the room, the pink jumper clad infant's cries rise to full shrieks as the four strangers enter.

The presumed neighbor is the last one into the living room; she pushes past Ziva in her quest to reach the crying infant when she halts. Her shriek is considerably louder than Nikki's.

On the floor beside the toppled easy chair Lydia Cavaluzzi lies on her back, her skirt partially up over her waist. Her hair is long, blonde and spread out above her head in a mass of flowing waves. Her eyes stare blindly at the ceiling.

Her once-white blouse is drenched in blood.


	4. Bloodbath

Chapter Four  
Bloodbath

Gibbs and his team check the living room, first just a visual overview. The body of Lydia Cavaluzzi lies on her back partially beyond the overturned blue leather recliner at the opposite end of the couch; her arms raised high over her head. Her white blouse is so drenched in blood that hardly any of its original color remains. Spatter covers the area in front of the couch and extends beyond the overturned recliner to cover the far wall, which is pockmarked with more than a dozen holes, plaster and paint broken away.

Thirteen month old Nicole clutches the bars of her playpen, her eyes locked on the still body of her mother. Ziva attempts to restrain the woman they'd met outside from contaminating the crime scene in her concern for the infant.

"Ziva." Gibbs' tone communicates his intent clearly enough. Once the child is quieted, they will all be able to think more clearly.

Ziva turns to the woman she's been blocking. "Wait _here_," she commands firmly, steps cautiously around the playpen in a wide arc, careful to avoid disturbing any blood spatter or other evidence. She reaches into the playpen; lifting Nicole from behind turns her hysterical cries into full blown shrieks, but Ziva carries the child into the woman's arms and escorts both of them outside, not touching the door.

As the sounds fade into the distance, it becomes possible for the three remaining agents to think and hear one another. McGee closes his cell phone as Gibbs turns to him. "Ducky's on his way."

"I think he could tell we needed him." Tony quips.

"He did get the sense something was wrong."

"McGee, the stuff. DiNozzo, search." He heads for the front door.

"Bring earplugs," DiNozzo advises.

x

Now that Nicole is being tended to by the two women beside Gibbs' car, she has quieted and the agents can get some cogent answers. "I live on the next street, our back yards meet midway," Mrs. Pamela Costello tells them. "I could hear Nikki crying when I stepped out back, and when she didn't quiet down after a minute or so I had a feeling something was wrong. I came around, Lydia didn't ans –." Grief, too long delayed, silences her, but when Nicole starts fussing in her arms she fights it back.

"How long ago was that?" Gibbs asks.

"I first heard her … about ten minutes before you got here." Costello has to stop, to try to restrain her grief. Neither agent pushes her. "Lydia's usually good about taking care of Nikki. She rarely cries long which is why I thought something was wrong."

"Did you hear anything prior to that?"

"No, I couldn't even hear Nikki until I came out back."

xx

Unable to allow Costello back into the house, Gibbs removes a filled bottle from the refrigerator, first directing McGee to photograph its position among three others on the door, then carries it outside. The milk will be too cold for use for the moment, but he sends Costello back to her own home by way of the streets, not permitting her to cut back across the yards. Ziva accompanies her to continue gathering information.

x

When Gibbs returns, McGee is photographing the room, marking sites of blood spatter as well as ejected cartridges with yellow numbered stands, documenting the detail as Tony measures and sketches the area, establishing coordinates as distances from walls, furniture and other landmarks that will provide scale to the scene. The photos start in one corner, a panoramic view of the entire room, then to the diagonal corner to get the opposite view before more detailed, close shots are taken; all details logged in McGee's notebook. None of them will approach the still body of Lydia Cavaluzzi until Ducky and Jimmy do so.

"There's a smashed laptop on the bedroom table," DiNozzo tells Gibbs, cocking his head toward the door on their right. "Someone worked it over with a baseball bat, not a lot left."

"Except the bat?"

"On the floor beside the table."

While the chance of fingerprints, and maybe even DNA, is fair, neither gets his hopes up too high. Gibbs' Rule 25 is 'Investigations are never easy – especially when they look easy.'

xx

Donald Mallard balances on the balls of his feet, crouching as close to the body of Lydia Cavaluzzi as he may get without touching the blood that has pooled into the brown carpet on either side of the woman's back. He lifts the left side of her blouse. "You had a terrible way to go, and in front of your daughter as well." He glances up at Gibbs. "I cannot tell you, with this degree of damage, exactly how many times the young lady was shot," he says as he lowers her blood soaked blouse over the massive wound, "but the fifteen holes in the wall behind me tells a good deal of the story."

For a gun to spray bullets and blood behind her to this extent, it is either quite powerful or fired at very close range. Abby will probably find GSW scorching mingled with the blood on her blouse. "How long ago did she die?"

"Judging from the liver temperature, the degree of lividity in her legs, buttocks and behind her head and the onset of rigor, or rather lack of same, I would say no more than two hours."

Gibbs checks his watch; they have been there for a half hour already.

"Normally we would not get this much blood pooling," Ducky continues, telling Gibbs what he already knows quite thoroughly, "but lividity accounts for the massive loss through her back into the carpet."

"Nine millimeter," DiNozzo reports from across the room, Gibbs looks up to see that he has measured each of the bullet holes in the wall. Removal of the bullets will require excising that whole section of the wall in order to avoid any damage to the rifling on the bullets. One does not simply pry bullets from walls; the surrounding wall goes to the lab. "It's likely from an Uzi or a full automatic, the spread has a diameter of only eighteen inches."

x

"She was standing when she was shot," Ducky tells them, "but not during all the time that she was being murdered." When Gibbs turns, he sees the Examiner has turned her body slightly, enough to see her back. While much of the damage is centered in a six inch wide space of destroyed flesh, a line of bloody holes rises upward toward her shoulder.

The reports and evidence paint a grizzly picture. Someone had turned a fully automatic weapon on the woman, a hail of bullets blasting her off her feet. The spray of blood forward and back indicates she had stood in front of the couch, the force of so many impacts making her collide with the overturned chair while destroying her chest and ripping through her. They had exited through her back in a tight enough formation before she started to fall to still cluster with no more than an eighteen inch spread seven to eight feet beyond where she had stood.

"Note the positions of her arms," Ducky says.

"I have." Had she been facing her assailant her arms might well have fallen to either side as she hit the floor. For them to have flopped over her head implies that her arms had already been raised, perhaps out to her sides before she had been shot. The autopsy would determine that. Worse than this, the positioning of the body paints a grizzly picture.

Ducky looks into the sightless eyes of the woman, his tone sympathetic. "It appears someone held you in your last moments, restraining your arms to make you a living target. Who would want to do so dastardly an act?"

x

"Ziva, break out the Luminol, check out the carpet."

The results are not long in coming. Though the massive spatters of blood are concentrated behind where the woman had been standing as the front and back of her body, there are three sets of exclusionary traces revealed by the previously almost invisible spray of blowback, one to each side of her original position, one about five feet forward. "Three sets of footprints," Gibbs muses. He doesn't bother to tell them to get pictures, he hardly needs to order the obvious. Later today a Forensics Team will descend upon this place. Among other duties, they will cut out the sections of the carpet and the rear wall, preserving the detailed evidence for Abby to examine.

"McGee, what about the laptop?" Gibbs asks as the agent comes back into the room, not wanting to deal with regrets or any personalization of this tragedy, not yet. Death is always deeply personal, only by concentrating on the job at hand could one learn to endure it. The brutal murder of a mother before the eyes of a screaming infant – that is something not to be dwelt upon.

"Whoever did it did a thorough job," McGee answers, "the thing's smashed beyond repair. The hard drive is in seven pieces. It'd take me two or three days to extract anything usable if I can at all. We're probably talking more like a week."

"You've got four."

"Hours," he finishes glumly.

"See, you're learning."

x

Tim McGee looks at the fragments of the shattered laptop scattered upon the desk before him, not looking forward to the task. "Gibbs just doesn't understand," he muses.

"Never has, Probie." Tony DiNozzo agrees from across the bedroom, where he is looking in the clothes closet on the far side of the bed. Their boss' lack of computer savvy is legendary. McGee doesn't look at him, contemplating what pieces of the electronic jigsaw puzzle he is left with are intact enough to fit into others.

"Putting together a hard drive; it's not like gluing a 45 back together so you can play one side. The data stored on a magnetic drive is very complex and often not even continuous, likely not contiguous, nor is the data stored circuitous. It can be imprinted and reimprinted in a seemingly random order tracked by the File Allocation Tables, which may not even be intact. There are billions of bytes to account for. The hard drive is in a dozen pieces, it's scratched, pulverized; I could be _days_ extracting anything useful from it and Gibbs wants a report in four hours. Reassembling data off a contiguous drive is sometimes hard enough, this is virtually impossible. I may never be able to find any usable, intact strings, let alone reproduce coherent data."

"I have no idea what you just said, but will these help?"

Tim turns about and sees that DiNozzo is holding a large plastic CD holder in his hands. Within it are row upon row of silver disks. "Tony, I could kiss you."

"_Hey_! Your love life is screwy enough as it is." He looks at the rows of disks in his hand. "What kind of killer breaks the computer and leaves the backups?"

"The stupid kind."

Tony grins. "My favorite breed."

xx

While Ziva, the former distaff half of said love life, dusts for prints at the door, Gibbs is about to enter the bedroom to check on the condition of the laptop when his cell phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and answers with characteristic brevity. He can barely hear Michelle Lee's voice over frantic questions demanded in high pitched shrieks, and closes the phone again to cut off the painful sound. "Ducky, you ready to move out?"

Mallard looks at the body before him; "Hardly, though I suppose I _could_. Why?"

"Have Palmer wrap things up. It sounds like you have a patient."

xxx

When Gibbs and Ducky walk down the corridor to NCIS' sub-basement Holding Cell, all is unexpectedly quiet. Considering the noise transmitted over the phone twenty minutes before, they had expected to hear shrieking and worse, but when they open the door they discover the reason for the quiet. Abby and Michelle are in the room on either side of 'Jane Butterfly', the girl's hands bound before her in black fur padded restraints. The girl is seated on a chair, forced by her large wings to sit facing sideways, sobbing brokenly. The sliced blue scrubs hang loosely from her body.

Abby is up as soon as the door opens and intercepts the men. "I had to give her some diazapam," she looks up at Gibbs, "it's a mild tranquilizer and anxiety relaxer. I was afraid she was going to hurt herself. When I got here she was bouncing off the walls, and every time she tried to rip the things off she only hurt herself."

"It appears you gave her more than Valium, my dear." Ducky observes, noting the padded cuffs. He really doesn't want to get into why she has them, especially on hand at NCIS.

"Just until she calms down, I can take them off any time."

Gibbs evaluates the crying woman, she is not hysterical. "Do it. Do you know who she is?"

Abby shakes her head and pulls a key out of her lab coat. "She's just down from the shrieking stage."

"I suggest going very, very slowly, Jethro."

Gibbs only nods, grateful for the man's experience in what is likely to be a long, tense interview. As Abby undoes the cuffs, he and Ducky take the two seats in front of the crying girl. As Abby and Michelle withdraw to the door, Gibbs waits patiently for their mystery guest to stop sobbing long enough to notice them. Finally when she does, she brushes tears from her eyes.

"Why did you do this to me? What do you want?"

"You were found walking on Highway 395; we don't know why you were there. I'm Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, this is Doctor Mallard. When you were found this morning, you were under the influence of a drug." He gives her time to absorb all this. "Do you remember anything?" It is many moments before she shakes her head.

"Gibbs? Mallard?"

"Call me 'Ducky'," he invites.

"Ducky. That's a nice name."

"Do you know who you are?" Gibbs asks, pitching his voice to as gentle and non-threatening a tone as he can.

"Crystal," she gulps, trying to regain her composure. "Crystal Britizze." The i's are sharp. She looks to Ducky, essaying a smile, however brief, as though trying to reach for a connection with the less intimidating man. "They call me 'Bright Eyes'. Go figure."

"Do you know what happened to you?" Gibbs asks. She visibly struggles to remember, and after long moments shakes her head. "Do you know what today is?"

"It's … I think it's … I can't think!"

"Just try to relax, my dear," Ducky advises, trying to head off her mounting anxiety. "Don't force it, let it come to you. Try to stay calm. What season do you remember?"

"Spring. Yes, I think I – I remember spring. It's April. Yes, yes I remember. It's April. April … 23rd," she sees the unguarded look in their eyes and it frightens her. "_Isn't it_?"

Ducky shakes his head. "Today is November 13." Her incredulous look is tinged with renewed panic. "Please, try to stay calm."

"_Seven_ months! Seven _months_! What _happened_ to me? What are these _things_ on my back? Who _did_ this to me? _WHY_? _Answer_ me!"

"We're trying to find out," Gibbs assures her. Rather he tries, but her panic mounts beyond the limit of the sedative to cope.

"Who _did_ this to me?" she cries, leaping to her feet. "Why? Get them _off_!" Before anyone can move she reaches back to the left wing, grips it and tries to yank it off. Her shriek reverberates though the room as she crashes to the floor, her sobbing lost in hysterical, agonized screams.

Gibbs, Abby and Michelle all move to help, but Ducky holds them all off, urging them to back away. He kneels down near the hysterical woman's head, moves her blonde hair aside to uncover her face and calls her name, his voice so gentle it's almost drowned out. He does this several times, with seemingly inexhaustible patience, until finally she recovers enough to look up at him.

"I assure you, we will find who did this to you, and we will have these things removed. We need you to be calm so that you might answer our questions and assist us in helping you. Can you do that?"

x

It is several more moments before she can stop crying enough to wipe the tears from her face. "Yes, Doctor," she whispers as she strives for control.

"That's good." He extends his hands, waiting patiently for her to take them; then he helps her to her feet. She manages to stand steadily, a flexing of her back muscles closing the wings. It's difficult to keep them out of sight, however, and when she relaxes they open again to their full span.

"You're sure you can get them off?"

"My dear, you have my word."

She turns to Gibbs at her left side, trying to calm herself, trying to trust these strangers with kind faces. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything you can tell us." He realizes this is going to take some time; it is not likely that at this point she has anything to tell. He signals to Michelle, all the while addressing Britizze. "I'd like Agent Lee to stay with you. Anything you remember – tell her."

Crystal turns to the smaller woman, visibly trying to place her in her memory. "Agent…"

"Michelle."

Abby also introduces herself. It is clear to them that Britizze is slightly more lucid than in the first minutes of coming out of the drug's influence and finding herself in a wildly surreal situation. They hope the young woman can hold on to this lucidity and stay calm.

xx

In the hall, Gibbs halts Abby. "What about the dirt on Cavaluzzi's palm?"

"That wasn't dirt, it was rust."

"Rust?" he is surprised at the succinctness of her answer. "Not ferric oxide or oxidized iron?"

"I decided to go easy on you."

"I appreciate that."

"I'm still analyzing it to determine what it is rust of, but I'd say he grabbed hold of something coated with it. It wasn't a hard grip, the stuff wasn't ground into his pores or the crevices of his hand, just surface stuff, but there was a lot of it."

xxx

In the Washington suburb of Rock Creek, three men enter a warehouse through the back door and navigate through a maze of crates to near the far end where, in the space formed by towering wooden packing crates, they meet a fourth man. "Is it done?" the blue suited man demands.

"Yeah, we done her and got rid of all his evidence," the tallest of them, a big blond Norwegian, reports gruffly, his craggy face wrinkling with his self-satisfied smile. He doesn't care for the man; considering him too superior, too aloof, but the money keeps Sven coming back for more jobs, distasteful though the man may be. When the overdressed man holds out his hand expectantly, Sven hands over the mini Uzi. At less than seven inches, it's no larger than a handgun, but the fully automatic weapon unleashes a bolt of 20 bullets in less than one second. It had made quick work of Cavaluzzi's widow, blowing a huge hole through her.

"Where is it?" the man asks as he examines the gun and its refilled magazine.

"Where's what?" Sven realizes it was an unfortunate question even before the man fixes his hard glare upon him.

"The evidence! Cavaluzzi's records! Where is it?"

"The only thing we found was a laptop and I smashed the hell out of it. No one is ever going to be able to put it back together again."

"You smashed it instead of bringing it in?" He cannot believe the incompetence. Now they may never know what Cavaluzzi had. But he forces the aggravation back, there's still one way.

"Where are the backups?"

"What backups?"

The man's patience is exhausted and when the men glance at one another, each more lost than the other, he feels his blood pressure peak. "_You left the backups for the police to find_?" His shout reverberates through the cavernous warehouse and he raises the gun.

Twenty 9mm bullets pepper Sven's chest. He's battered off his feet, blood explodes from his chest to cover him in that second and he's dead before he hits the floor. The two other men stare in incredulous horror at their companion's corpse as the man ejects the spent magazine, pulls a fresh one from his pocket and slaps it into place.

"Get back there! Get the backups and everything else. And remember," he points the Uzi at them, "there's no place for you to run."

They run.

x

Disgusted, Martin Scorza steps over to one of the piles of crates and pulls on the edge of a stack of two. The side of it, and the crate below, both swing open to reveal a dark staircase. Starting down, he pulls the false sides of the crates behind him, walking down the stairs to the thin edging of light surrounding the door at the base. He'll send someone up from the lab to dispose of the trash above, but for now he has more important things to think about.

The stairs open onto a brightly lit complex, the room across the corridor from him a large laboratory, the clear wall shows a dozen white coated men working on a number of projects. Computers abound in this room, one of many that fill the chamber. The maze of corridors under the warehouse is lined with clear walls to show everything within, one can stand at one end of the complex and see all the way to the other. Only the three offices on the far right have opaque walls which obscure the view from the labs and other rooms.

On the far wall is a bank of large plasma screens, each monitor shows a different yet eerily similar scene. Each image is of a nude young woman alone in a ten foot square cubical set up with all the accoutrements of a doctor's examining room. Some of the young women stand, some sit and some lay face downward, sleeping drugged sleep. Some women have butterfly wings grafted to their backs, some various bird's wings; some bat, others have more exotic designs. Even the least valued of them will net him a million dollars.

x

The women, all in their late teens, all beautiful and in the prime of life, are in transparent cells to the left, sixteen of them remain in twenty four cells, always under observation. They are oblivious to everything around them, kept so by regular drugging to keep them quiet and compliant.

But these open areas, intended to allow no secrecy, had not helped prevent the Navy Doctor from betraying them. He had been supposed to bring one of the women to the lab for regular tests, not slip unobserved through the only door.

He'd gotten the girl all the way to the street before he'd been seen by a guard. However, shooting him hadn't prevented his escape, and before pursuit could be mounted he was gone.

Getting their prize back is proving harder than it has to be, and time is running short. She had been ready for delivery; just another few days and she would be on her way. If she is not found, he's out a million dollars.

Now, due to the incompetence of these idiot guards, the traitor's wife is dead with no information obtained. She should have been brought in for questioning. He should not have to spell out the obvious for those idiots. Maybe, even if she didn't know anything, she could possibly have replaced the 'painted lady'. He'd heard she was pretty, maybe he could've found a buyer even if his main client wasn't interested. Then he would still have made a profit.


	5. Following the Trail

Chapter Five  
Following the Trail

"Ah, Mr. Palmer, there is nothing in this world sadder than the death of a young mother, and no murder more despicable than that committed in front of her child."

"Yes, doctor."

Jimmy's tone tells his mentor that he has nothing to add. The body of Lydia Cavaluzzi lies between them, the left side of her chest from sternum to mid-breast devastated by twenty closely spaced holes. X-rays have already been taken and have revealed the locations of the five bullets that had not joined their fellows in the wall at her home, a total of twenty snuffing out the life of this woman scarcely four feet from her helpless infant.

The bullets that remain in her body had taken widely disparate courses upon striking ribs and sternum and spine and have ended their paths everywhere from her throat to her colon. These five must be retrieved; hopefully some of them will be in sufficiently good condition for Abby Sciuto to identify the gun that had killed her. So violent was her death that Ducky has no doubt there will be a record somewhere of the gun having been used before.

"I wish I could tell you," Ducky says to the woman, looking to her closed eyes as though they were open and she could hear and understand what he says, "that your death had some purpose or that all would be well with your daughter. I can only tell you that you are now in good hands." He looks to his associate. "Mr. Palmer?"

"Yes, doctor?" He's surprised to see Ducky hold out the scalpel to him for the second time today. "You want me to–?"

"The Cavaluzzi case is not yet completed. You did well with Lieutenant Cavaluzzi, now it is time to see how well you fare with his wife."

Jimmy takes the implement. "Well, I … let's see. Do you mind?"

"Not at all, Mr. Palmer." They trade places at the table, allowing Jimmy to work right handed upon the body. There was a time when Ducky would advise him on the initial 'Y' incisions, not too shallow but not too deep; those days have passed. The young man had performed the previous autopsy quiet adequately; it remains only to see how he does in this next one.

xx

In the Squad Room, DiNozzo reports to his boss, "I have Lieutenant Cavaluzzi's Service Record. He's been the Assistant CMO at Quantico for 11 years. I've notified his Chief to expect us, but not that he's dead. Doctor Keith Paulson wasn't surprised that Cavaluzzi didn't show up for work today; apparently he's taken an odd number of vacation days, irregular schedule. When Paulson asked, Cavaluzzi told him he and the Missus have been having family problems."

Gibbs looks at the clock on the far wall, it will take far too long to make a round trip out to Quantico, especially if Abby and Ducky are correct about the window of opportunity he has to interview Crystal Britizze. "Get back on the line with him; tell him I need to speak with him in MTAC. Ziva, what do you have on Britizze?"

"She was reported missing from her dorm at Washington College when she did not report for classes for two days. It is a private, code institution –"

"Co-ed," DiNozzo corrects.

Ziva continues, annoyed at the attempted interruption, "in Chestertown, Maryland, about 30 miles east of Baltimore. That was April 25."

"Great care they take of their students," DiNozzo observes while he punches in the number for the Medical Facility at Quantico. "Two days since she's been seen and they get around to making a report?"

"Chestertown PD found nothing in her room to indicate what happened to her. Apparently she had last been seen by one of her friends when she told her she was going for a walk."

"A seven month walk? Where has the investigation gone?"

"She is one of a dozen Maryland has on record that went missing during the month of April, no leads. It has pretty much become a Cold Case. No ransom note, no body, no sign of foul play. The School Officials, citing her grades, think she just walked off."

"Walked off." Gibbs is thoroughly disgusted. "You get on the line and tell Chestertown her body was walking on Highway 395 this morning and I want to talk to the lead investigator on the case."

"Boss," DiNozzo hangs up his phone, "Doctor Paulson is on in MTAC."

"Tony, while McGee's putting Humpty Dumpty together, you see what you can do on Cavaluzzi's phone records. Find out where he made and received calls. I care more about where he was when he got or made them."

"On it, boss."

This case is overloaded with victims, three they have and eleven they do not, and not enough clues as to how they tie together. Thus far there seems to be no link between Cavaluzzi and Britizze, or why Lydia Cavaluzzi had also been murdered. Was it to keep her quiet, or was she a loose end? With too many partial leads and not enough agents, he hopes Paulson can clear up some of the muddle.

xx

The MTAC facility, with its main view screen and several supporting monitors, is never brightly lit and the dimness at this time seems to bear the regret of grim news. Gibbs faces upon the huge screen the enlarged image of a uniformed Navy Captain, the insignia on his collar indicate the Navy Medical Corps. "Captain Paulson?"

"I'm Keith Paulson. I understand from your Agent DiNozzo that you have news for me about Arthur Cavaluzzi."

Gibbs can see the man is cautiously apprehensive, with good reason. Urgent calls from NCIS about an absent colleague are never good news. "Yes, sir, I'm afraid he's dead."

Paulson takes the news as well as can be expected. His eyes close, but the tension slowly eases from his chest and shoulders, as though he had anticipated, or dreaded, just those words. "How did he die?" It's only after asking that he can face the agent.

"He was shot. His body was found in his van on Highway 395 about a mile from the Navy Yard. We believe he was on his way here." Gibbs will want to review this recorded conversation later to confirm the doctor's reactions to what he'll say. Such reviews always prove very interesting, allowing time to get what can be missed at the first interview. "When was the last time you saw or heard from him?"

"Yesterday morning. He phoned to tell me he wouldn't make it in. He's been taking an irregular number of days off lately. I understand he and his wife are having some problems."

Considering that they've been shot to death many miles apart on the same day, leaving a thirteen month old child behind, this is an understatement. "Do you know what problems?"

"No, I don't. He has been unusually tense for a couple of months, but would never talk about what's – what _was_ wrong."

Nothing the back yard neighbor he'd interviewed had indicated Lydia Cavaluzzi suffered any marital problems. In fact, to his direct question she had said 'no'. "Have you any idea who might know?"

"No. Over the past few months he's become rather closed off. He used to be close to quite a few of the staff, but not lately. He hasn't been as active, off duty, as usual and doesn't – didn't – socialize like he used to. When he is here he does his work as well as one might expect, but as soon as his shift is over he's gone."

"Home?"

"I expect so. I don't know."

He'll send a team out to collect all of Cavaluzzi's records, as well as his computer. However, he doesn't intend to let Paulson know about that until he has to, with the agents already on site.

"Is there anything you can think of, however insignificant it may seem, that might lead to why he might have been so tense?"

Paulson shrugs. "Your guess is as good as mine."

"I'm not here to guess."

xxx

"Our unfortunate friend here," Ducky says, indicating to Gibbs the unclad corpse of Lydia Cavaluzzi as they stand together looking down at the body, "was shot twenty times at close range, fifteen of the bullets penetrated her completely to lodge in the wall behind her. They destroyed everything from the left ventricle of her …"

He stops, recalls his earlier intent and turns to his assistant standing by the desk. "My apologies, Mr. Palmer; force of habit. This case is yours."

"Oh, that's all right, doctor, you can–" The look his mentor gives him says he is not going to wiggle out of this. For a moment he'd thought he would be spared, now he's back on the hot seat again.

Stepping up to the table, he prays he can get through this without stammering. Usually, when he makes that attempt, he fails worse than ever.

"Well, as Dr. Mallard said, the bullets tore apart everything from her heart to the right half of the left lung. The remaining five collided with her ribs, sternum and vertebrae. They fractured them and ricocheted in all directions. The entry wounds were in the same area on the left side of her chest, the bullets went through most of the organs from hips to clavicle. I removed these bullets and Dr. Mallard brought them up to Abby." He looks at the older man, but Ducky shows no sign of wanting to take over. Taking a deep, not so calming breath, he continues.

"The bullets ripped her heart and lung to pieces. I can't begin to tell which of the twenty bullets were the fatal ones. But an Uzi, that is if it was an Uzi, is really, really fast – and of course you know this." He almost stops at Gibbs' look, but Mallard silently urges him to continue. "If it was an Uzi, Dr. Mallard tells me twenty shots will take about a second. I _can_ tell you, based on the angle of the wounds – the path they took through her body, that is - says her arms were stretched out to the sides when she was shot."

"They held her while they blew her away."

The men have rarely heard Gibbs' tone so grim, and for good reason. The picture Jimmy has painted is not a bearable one. "Yes."

xxx

"Arthur Cavaluzzi was definitely livin' la dolce vita," DiNozzo reports when he sees Gibbs enter the bullpen, then he continues to read off his monitor screen. "Records show he'd had a twenty year mortgage on the house, they were making regular payments and had another fourteen years to go. This past April he paid the whole thing off in one lump sum. Not too smart; I wonder if the wife ever knew."

"What else?"

"Their three credit cards, nearly maxed out, were paid off so fast Visa and Master Card didn't know what hit them. Trust funds for the kid; twenty grand a month for almost a year, she could retire before I do."

"The way you go through money, I could believe it, DiNozzo."

"Heh heh. I could go on but the point is Cavaluzzi is living far beyond a Navy Commander's salary."

"I disagree," Ziva cuts in.

"You do, do you?"

"Yes, Tony, I have been looking at the same records. He paid off his house, opened trust funds, life insurance policies, yet while they lived a reasonable degree of comfort there was nothing in the home to indicate he was living 'la dolce vita' or any other kind of significant vita. This is a man who made provisions, provided for his family's futures but did not subscribe to the stereotypical American dream of cars, yachts and thousand dollar Entertainment systems."

"I agree," Tim interjects. "Remember Micky Stokes, he hid millions of dollars in bank loot in plain sight, but this time there is no Chippendale mahogany case clock, no first edition 'Huckleberry Finn', no rosewood bureau plat desk."

"Which just shows Cavaluzzi was better at hiding things, probably from the Missus."

"You do not think she knew?" Ziva asks.

"The woman's always the last to know."

Ziva stares at him, mouth open, too astonished to be offended.

"What you're saying," Gibbs cuts in to intercept an eventual conflict, "is that nearly a year ago Cavaluzzi came into a steady stream of money and has been using it to pay off debts and make provisions."

"And between that and what _I_ found," McGee says, "I'd say we have enough of a motive for murder."

x

McGee's eyes aren't on his colleagues when he makes this announcement but are locked upon his monitor screen, so he fails to notice the expectation in the eyes that converge on him or the silence that descends upon the bullpen. After two seconds of waiting, Gibbs steps over to the abstracted man's desk, puts his hand flat upon it and leans in closely. "_WHAT_?"

"Oh, sorry, boss," he says, finally looking up from the screen into Gibbs impatient glare. "I was reading Commander Cavaluzzi's personal journal – his computer diary – it was encoded with–"

"I don't care if it was encoded with a ring from a cereal box, what does it _say_?"

"He wasn't very specific, but he does say many times that he was very uncomfortable with something he was being forced to do. He described it as a 'moral dilemma', says he didn't know how much longer he could keep it up. He said the urge to get out or get help was growing all the time."

"_How_ unspecific is it?"

"Um, very unspecific. Apparently he didn't even trust his own private records; that's one reason they were encrypted with DOD-level algorithms."

"Who uses DOD encryption on a diary?" DiNozzo asks.

"Someone with something to hide. You keep digging, McGee; I don't care if you have to use a shovel, you _find_ those answers."

xxx

Seated at his desk, Gibbs decides he's given Abby enough time. He picks up his phone.

/Hi,/ he hears after two rings, /you've reached Station A-B-B-Y, coming to you with news 24 hours a day./

"It really seem like that?"

/Only on short days. I've been known to do 36 in a day./

"Did you get anything on the bullets?"

/Yep. The one that hit Lt. Cavaluzzi was a 9x19mm Parabellum; it's a pistol cartridge introduced in 1902 by the Germans for their Lugers. It used to come in 7.65x22, now they use the smaller ones and you'll find them in pistols, submachine guns and carbines. Now I think, from what Tony told me over the phone, that Mrs. Cavaluzzi was hit by a Micro-Uzi. It's a 250 mm weapon slightly larger than a pistol but with wicked killing power. It'll fire 1,250 rounds a minute; a 20 round magazine will go in .96 seconds./

"More firepower than anyone needs."

/Now you're _not_ talking like a Marine. Did you know Parabellum is derived from the Latin motto 'Si vis pacem, para bellum'?/

"'If you seek peace, prepare for war'."

/Foxy, sexy _and_ smart,/ she says appreciatively.

"It's a killer combination."

/You slay me every day./

He hangs up and sits back in black abstraction. Why did someone graft fake butterfly wings into Crystal Britizze's back? This outré question seems to be the crux of the case. If he knew the answer to this, he would know who they were and where to hunt them. Not for the first time does he miss the opportunity to consult with Bob DiMarco. The old Marine SSA usually had a refreshing view of things that led to answers in the thorniest of cases.

Sadly, DiMarco's viewpoints had led to tragedy for all of NCIS and he'll never again be able to consult his old friend. But the misguided agent had come to mind frequently over the past hours. Something about him, or their relationship, holds an answer, a clue, a hint in their current case.

He finds himself envying Ducky Mallard. The Medical Examiner has a penchant for talking to the dead that he neither hides nor makes excuses for. No, he's usually quite eloquent in articulating his reasons. And sometimes the dead, in the quiet tones of the Examiner's investigations, even speak back.

Unfortunately, Ducky is the one skilled at getting answers from the dead. Gibbs has to get his from the living.

He reaches for the speaker button on his phone and presses a combination. /Holding,/ Michelle Lee's voice acknowledges a moment later.

"Lee, bring Britizze up to the Squad Room, I want to talk to her."

"Yes, sir."

xx

Michelle leads the apprehensive young woman off the elevator and as they walk the short distance to the bullpen it's as though a wave of silence emanates from them to fill the floor. One by one attention is pulled away from monitors and work to an astonishing mosaic of silken color on the back of the woman.

Crystal Britizze is still clothed in modified green/blue scrubs taken from Autopsy, but her colorful wings extend over three feet to either side. She can force them closed by flexing the muscles in her back but the effort is tiring, they naturally revert to their full open display. When she enters the bullpen she must force the wings closed to clear the space between the partitions between DiNozzo's and David's desks. Her eyes are filled with trepidation; she hasn't been out of Holding since she'd regained her senses. Now she is brought to a stop before one of the very few familiar people in this place.

"How are you?" Gibbs asks.

"How am I?" she exclaims, "I'm freaking out, that's how I am!" She looks at the agent on the opposite side of Gibbs' partition. "Do you _have_ ta fuckin _stare_?"

Gibbs stands up, "_Hey_! If you're not busy I have a half dozen old cases you can solve!" He doesn't bother to hear the chastised agent's reply, turning instead to the embarrassed woman. He's also as annoyed with himself as his fellow agent. What had he been thinking of, summoning her up here?

"Come with me," he tells her, leading her out of the bullpen. He walks slowly, lets her set the pace around obstacles to her wings, heading for the illusionary solitude under the stairs that lead up to MTAC. "Have you been able to remember anything about the people who did this to you?"

She shakes her head, frustrated. "I can't. I get hazy images, bits and pieces, fragments but it's a jumble, nothing makes _sense_." They come around the base of the stairs, entering the orange cul-de-sac, "Sometimes I feel I can almost –!" she stops with a gasp of terror, hands covering her mouth to contain a scream, eyes wide, her breath reduced to frantic gasps. She cringes and draws back, her breath so labored she cannot speak. Gibbs searches the area for the source of her panic, but finds nothing at all. The only thing to distinguish the plain orange walls basing the staircase is the large, full color representation of NCIS' emblem.

"Oh God! Oh God – no! Please! No!"

"What's wrong?" She's staring at the round emblem. He interposes his body between it and her wide, terror filled eyes.

"Oh God! Please - No!"

He takes her shoulders firmly, forcing her to meet his eyes. "What's wrong?"

"That!" she points past him at the offending sigil. "They did it to her! Oh God – _they did it to her_!"

"_Who_?"

"Carmen!" She points to the full color shield. "They did it to her too! They made her an _Eagle_!"

x

Looking back, Gibbs can see the logic in the gut feeling that had led him to bring Crystal Britizze to this spot, but now his concern is in getting sense from her panic stricken recollection. "Tell me what you remember. What did you see?"

"I saw _Carmen_ – she had wings! Like that!" she points emphatically to the emblem.

"Like an eagle?"

"_Exactly_ like that! They hung like – they were on her – she's–"

"Try to calm down. Take it calmly. We can help."

"You _can't_ help, God damn it! You _can't_ help!"

"Why not?"

"_Because she's already been sold_!"


	6. An Old Friend

Chapter Six  
An Old Friend

"I remember!" Crystal exclaims as she turns from the ornate emblem on the wall under the staircase so quickly she almost hits Gibbs with her huge butterfly wings. "That is, I don't remember, but I _remember_!"

"Try to be calm," Gibbs speaks softly, trying to ease through the young woman's frantic exclamations. "Take a deep breath, let it out slowly. Don't try to force the memory, just let it come, then hold on to it."

Crystal cannot stop trembling, but she finds the strength to rally. "I was … it was white. I remember – a room. But it wasn't … wasn't a room. There were … there were other – other women … all around me. Like me, like Carmen! I could see them, but – but I – I wasn't with them. I don't know what I mean. I could see them, but … I can't remember!"

"Try to hold onto it. Don't force it, let it come."

"I DON'T REMEMBER!"

Her shrill cry brings several agents hurrying to the cul-de-sac; Gibbs waves them away before Crystal can see them. She is huddled in upon herself, trembling, sobbing. He takes a step around her into her eyeline and she backs away, terror overwhelming all else. "Keep _away_ from me! What did they do to me? Why? Why can't I _remember_?" She backs nearly to the base of the stairs and he backs away, giving her space.

"You will," he hopes it more than he can assure her. From what Abby has said, she might never regain her memory of those months, but he has to offer hope. "We'll find them. We'll get them. What more can you tell me?"

"I can see – I can see through the walls. They're glass, plastic, I don't know, but I have no privacy. Other women, like me, naked – wings. All kinds of wings."

"How many?"

"I don't know!"

He won't push. "You said Carmen was sold."

The reminder pushes past her fear. "Sold. She was sold. They made her sleep; they came in and took her away."

"Who did?"

"Men. Men in white coats."

"Do you know them?"

"No! But they were going to sell me! _They were going to sell me_!" She begins to cry. "Why did they do it?" She backs into the stair base, her wide, colorful wings flattening out against it. "I never did anything to them! I didn't do anything!"

"Do you remember who told you that you were going to be sold?"

She shakes her head. Gibbs doesn't want to push, not yet. She's just coming out of months of drug induced stupor; too much pressure at this point and they could lose the fragmented evidence just starting to resurface. He steps past her until he can see Michelle Lee at her desk and signals her to approach.

"Crystal, I'm going to have Agent Lee take you back downstairs. Whatever you can remember, no matter what it is, tell her."

Britizze nods sharply, unable to endure more.

xxx

Ted Parson stops his car across the street from the home of Arthur and Lydia Cavaluzzi, distressed to see the yellow 'Crime Scene' tape stretched across the wooden fence and an MPDC car parked at the curb. He turns to Kevin Baker in the seat beside him. "We screwed." He puts the car in gear, rolling away, hoping the police haven't taken note of them.

"Dude, we go back there without the stuff–!" he can't say it. "Looka what he done to Sven. He gonna do the same to us."

"Well, we can't go in there. They musta found the shit by now."

"Whata we gonna do? We can't run from them."

Parson steps on the accelerator. "We can try."

xxx

Gibbs is surprised, when he returns to the bullpen, to see Ducky waiting for him. Usually he's the one to go down to Autopsy to see the venerable man.

"Jethro, I have been thinking about Miss Britizze."

"We all have," Gibbs follows the unique woman with his eyes as Lee escorts her to the elevator. "I could sure use some of your Forensic Psychology stuff at this point."

"No evaluations yet, but I do have a colleague in Edinburgh, Dr. Charles Kendrick, who might be able to assist me. He has made a specialty of this sort of thing."

"Putting wings on people?"

"Oh, good heavens, no, Jethro, I'm speaking of reconstructive surgery, with work done below the subdural level, grafting flesh to bone in living persons, sometimes with substitutions for fibrous fascia, the connective tissue that bind skin to muscle. Yes, I'm particularly thinking of the method used to anchor these wings to her bones. I should like to use MTAC to arrange a video conference so I may share x-ray images and so forth. I have already had Mr. McGee digitize those I need."

"Done. When will he be ready?"

Ducky has a rare moment of chagrin. "Actually, I took the liberty of arranging it already, but I wanted you there as well. He's ready now, if we may."

Gibbs extends his hand back toward the staircase. "Lead the way."

x

The MTAC facility is the heart of communications and surveillance for NCIS, a mini-theater dominated by several medium and one huge video screen. As the men enter, the screens are dark but telltale lights are active. Ducky is about to turn everything over to Gibbs, but the Senior Agent takes a seat in one of the observation chairs, leaving Ducky front and center and somewhat uncomfortable before the big screen.

"What frequency is Dr. Kendrick using?" he asks the technicians monitoring the system from the control consoles to his left.

"D."

Ducky shrugs. "Open Channel D."

x

The screen comes to life, showing a many times enlarged image of a man easily as old as Ducky, though his shock of white hair makes him look ten years older. It's the sort of intense white that only light blond people can hope to achieve in later life. "Ducky! Good to see you, old man."

"It has been too long, Charles."

The man wears a maroon smoking jacket and the background seen behind him is covered with scores of books. They get the sense he is transmitting from a study in some ancient estate.

"Annette will never forgive me if I do not start off by inviting you to visit; we'd love to get together with you and renew old times."

"I would love to also. But I'm told I may only have this facility for a short period. You received the x-rays and other materials I e-mailed you?"

"Yes," Kendrick's jovial manner dissolves, "quite the case. What is the young lady's condition?"

"The surgery took place between six and seven months ago, the invasive work is almost completely healed and the wings are integrated to the tissues. The material used to anchor the wings to the bones is a very dense material; I included such specs as I was able to obtain. Short of exploratory surgery which I do not want to inflict upon the already traumatized young woman, there was little that I could do."

"Unfortunate. I should like to have a sample. Without it, I can only guess, but diploridazam sounds like a possibility. It has a very high tensile strength but its rejection rate is less than .2 percent."

Ducky decides to go out on a limb. "Ever hear of anyone using them to attach a pair of wings?" Kendrick's hesitation is heartbreakingly long. "Charles?"

"Not exactly, no. I may have…."

Gibbs is out of his seat immediately, coming up beside Ducky, "May have what, Doctor?"

Ducky gives a brief introduction; equally curious about the answer and wondering why it so distresses his friend.

"There have been stories, rumors. I am not sure…" he looks away, then back to the screen. "May I call you back, Ducky?"

"As soon as possible, please."

Kendrick reaches out to an unseen control and his image vanishes.

"What do you make of that, Duck?"

"Charles was very concerned."

"Ya think?" He refrains from asking the unanswerable 'what about?' "Do you trust him?"

Ducky looks up, trying not to be offended by the question. "As much as I trust you."

xx

"DiNozzo, I want you to check into unusual surgical grafts in Scotland," Gibbs commands as he enters the bullpen.

"Wings?"

"Anything out of the ordinary."

"Any hint what I'm looking for?"

"I'll know it when you find it."

"I figured I would."

"Boss," McGee calls from his desk, "I've been thinking."

"It had better be about deciphering Cavaluzzi's journal."

"That too. But Lee's been with Britizze all day without a break."

"Who do you suggest, McGee? _Ziva_?" he casts his arms to include the surrounding teams as well, all occupied with their own concerns. "I'm fresh out of agents."

"Not Ziva. But we could sure use Michelle's help up here." He barely wants to think of the mounting pile of clues and the even larger mountain of questions. They could use another set of agents on this one, if only others were available. "I do have one other idea…"

xxx

Reverend Siobhan O'Mallory works at her desk in the parish office she shares with Rev. George Donaldson, reviewing the last notes on her Sermon for the Saturday evening service when her phone rings. She doesn't even look away from her papers, "Saint Mary the Virgin Church, Mother O'Mallory."

/Hi, Shav./

She feels the greeting down to her toes. Only one person in the world calls her by that nickname – by any nickname come to that – and she smiles brightly. She forces herself to erase that smile an instant later when she glances at George Donaldson seated at the other desk near the left wall, not wanting to look like she's grinning like a lovesick schoolgirl, certain she presents so unflattering an image even though his attention is on his computer's monitor.

"Hi, Timmy," her whisper is so low she can barely hear herself.

/God, you have the most incredibly sexy whisper./

She feels her heart skip a beat, but the blush that rises to her face is particularly unwelcome. "Please, I wish you wouldn't talk like that on the phone," she whispers quietly. It is one thing to be _finally_ having an open and mature relationship, quite another to have it broadcast indiscreetly.

/Do you think the others would be jealous that I'm in love with the most beautiful woman on the planet?/

"What's her name? I can be jealous too." He doesn't answer and she fears her teasing has touched a still raw wound.

Less than a month ago his relationship with Ziva David had come to an explosive end. After the carnage had cleared, the agents had been left with a 'business relationship' while his love affair with Siobhan has flared to dazzling brightness.

x

Though they cannot always be together, he doesn't miss an opportunity to call her at least twice each day, as well as 'casually encountering' her in her NCIS office on Tuesdays with innocence so contrived that it fools no one at all. But despite their far more loving, open relationship of late, they each have masks they must sometimes wear.

She glances at Donaldson. He is still reading and oblivious to her whispered conversation, but he certainly will not remain so if she keeps conversing so clandestinely.

/Shav, I need you./

"Timmy," she says aloud, determined to gain control of this conversation before it gets out of hand.

/Shav, I'm not sure I'm making the right choice, but between you and a bunch of Navy Therapists, I'm inclined to prefer you./

"You sure know how to make a woman feel special," she quips. She isn't sure where he is going with this, but there's an edge to his tone that's far from playful.

/I need to see you, can you get away?/ Before she can answer, he continues, /I'm on my way to you now, I'll explain what's happening on the way back. It'll take too long to go into over the phone. I'll be there in less than ten minutes./

Feeling astonished and trapped, unable to imagine what could be so urgent that it would make him so presumptive, all she can say is "All right." She puts down the phone.

"Dating never is easy," Donaldson observes, only then turning to her.

x

She isn't sure if this observation is sympathetic or ironic. "This isn't a _date_, it's work. At least it sounds like work."

"What kind of work?"

She opens her desk drawer, taking out her PDA and a leather case which contains a set of Government IDs and a gold shield, stalling the annoying admission as long as she can. "I don't know."

She doesn't like being pulled away from her duties by a cryptic message and the expectation that she'll just drop everything to hop in a car and take off on a mysterious errand. This is something she intends to _explain_ to Timmy in great detail on the way in to NCIS Headquarters. "Whatever it is, it doesn't sound good. I'll call when I know what time I'll be getting back." Closing the drawer, she goes to the coat stand and pulls on her jacket.

"Good luck."

"Thanks," she is part way out the door when she stops and looks back over her shoulder, "and George?"

"Hmmm?"

"_Tomorrow's_ the date."

xx

Siobhan waits at their usual rendezvous at the most distant edge of the rear fenced parking lot, tightening her jacket against the late afternoon November chill. She is far from the view of anyone who might enter or leave, not that there are any expected to do so at this hour but habits are hard to break. She had started meeting him here when she was concerned that her professional relationship with the man might be misconstrued by parishioners and Church employees as something more. Now it is something more, and she's openly dating, but she does this more by rote, coming to the 'usual spot' even though she doesn't have to.

Since Timmy's breakup with Ziva David – actually she'd broken with him – and the subsequent resolution of their own relationship, things have changed drastically. Though she tries to keep a personal and professional life separate, she no longer keeps what is now an actual romantic relationship a veiled secret from anyone.

Yes, the Curate of St. Mary the Virgin _is_ dating a man; and no, you are not invited to ask.

The wind catches her red hair and whips it up so that in the window of the SUV beside her it looks like her head is ablaze. She catches it, pulling it back into control just as she sees his car enter the far side of the lot, all the while admitting the image is appropriate for her mood.

She feels her annoyance evaporate, however, as she catches sight of him behind the wheel as he circles to where he knows she's standing. It is amazing how her mood can so quickly change just by seeing him or hearing his voice or ….

When he stops the car she gets in and leans over to kiss him, drawing the pleasure out as long as she can. "Timmy," she whispers softly when she draws back, "I love you."

"I love you too, Shav," he tells her, his voice as intimate as hers.

She smiles sweetly, all her affection for him reflected in her emerald eyes; then she reaches up and smacks the back of his head.

x

"_That's_ for calling me up with some 'cloak and dagger' story and expecting me to drop everything and come running." She'd seen Special Agent Gibbs do this on occasion and though this is the first time she's ever been tempted to copy him, she feels it to be well deserved. "I'm a busy woman and I can't just drop everything into George's lap and–"

"We have an emotionally devastated girl found wandering naked on the side of Highway 395. She'd been kidnapped and surgically altered, forcibly addicted for seven months to a 'date rape' drug and is scared out of her mind," he tells the astounded woman. "She can't remember what happened to her or why huge butterfly wings have been grafted into her back." He gives her a moment to integrate this astonishing detail. "She doesn't know why a Navy Lieutenant was found shot dead in the car with her. She was gradually becoming lucid but suffered a major shock. Michelle is trying to deal with her while we try to figure things out, including why someone took an Uzi to the Lieutenant's widow and left a thirteen month old infant alone on the house, but we can use help. She'll soon be suffering withdrawal and be unable to tell us anything. Honestly, right now she doesn't seem to trust anyone –" he points to the white collar encircling Siobhan's throat, "– I'm just praying she'll trust you."

Siobhan had felt her mouth slowly falling open at this outrageous litany, now she closes it. "Well, what are you sitting here for? Drive!"

xxx

Martin Scorza looks up from his desk, vastly aggravated when his office door flies outward. 'What's the point of having an office if every imbecile–?' "_What_?" he growls.

"You'd better see this," the white coated doctor crosses the room, heading for the television. Scorza bites back his response, a directive of what the intruder had 'better be doing', when he sees the image that appears on the screen.

It's a medium close-up of an Anchorwoman from ZNN seated at her desk, but it's the smaller image inset above the woman's left shoulder that grasps his attention.

"We showed this morning a tie up on Highway 395 from our traffic helicopter. Since then, however, we have obtained some rather surprising images I'm sure you'll want to see."

The inset expands to fill the screen from a vantage across the concrete meridian, clearly taken from a high angle and then enhanced. On the right side is the front half of a blue and white truck; the only words visible are "NC' and 'Major Case R'. There are two cars between the two vans. Five men and three women are clustered about the back door of a blue van, from which a white sheet has been attached which stretches to the door of the trailing car, forming a backdrop to the scene to block the views of passing motorists. One of the women, a blonde whose front is partially covered by a brown jacket, sports an impressive pair of colorful wings.

"_FUC_-!" Scorza's yell drowns out the anchor woman's first words; then he shuts himself up enough to listen.

"eral Agents found and took into custody what appears from these images to be what our NewsCam described as a 'butterfly woman'. We have been unable to obtain corroborating information from any law enforcement organizations. In other news–"

Scorza shuts off the television, struggling to contain his rage.

"They're going to find us," the man at his side predicts. "We should get out of here."

Scorza turns to the younger man, incredulity momentarily diverting his fury. "Get out of here? Get _out_ of here? We have sixteen women left, only half of them ready for shipment and four _million_ dollars worth of equipment. Where the FU–?" He breaks off, trying to think. "Get the hell out of here and let me solve this." He starts back to his desk, determined to search the Internet for any further news.

The other man, recalling the story from those who'd been detailed to dispose of the body of the unfortunate guard, is wise enough not to push his point.

x

Scorza sits behind his desk, trying to review his options. Should he post additional guards? He would if he had them, but his remaining people are already in place on the surrounding rooftops. Throughout the operation, he had depended on anonymity and secrecy, but with Cavaluzzi's treason all that has changed.

His guards had failed to catch up to Cavaluzzi. They'd failed to get him at his home and instead had bungled everything, now it's obvious why: the man hadn't been heading home and hadn't reached any other destination either. Who knows what Cavaluzzi has told the police? The man's wife is dead, with no profit in that. The guards haven't returned; he can only conclude they have been captured and that they, like Cavaluzzi, have talked.

Can he expect an attack? Yes, and in force. When? Soon. Can he get away? He can, but what of their cargo? Their buyer wants perfect deliveries; most of these women aren't ready.

They represent a net profit of sixteen million dollars. Can he walk away from that? The operation depended on secrecy because there was no money for a backup facility. There's this place and nothing more.

He can save himself, but what then?

All right, what are the alternatives? The shrinks say these women's brains are blasted, they can't reveal anything. Can Cavaluzzi? He was shot, wounded by those incompetent bastards who _still_ couldn't catch him. Is he dead? His van was parked on the highway, what does that mean?

Do the Feds know anything at all, or are they working blind – just as he is? The Internet reveals nothing; there is no mention of a 'Butterfly Woman' other than what has already been said. Is it being suppressed? Is he secure, or already in deadly danger?

This place has, to this point, been secure and secret, but if won't remain so if Cavaluzzi or the guards talked. He has three more guards; they'll stay on post 24 hours a day until he says otherwise, but is this enough? Should he run? Should he run away from sixteen _million_ dollars? Only four women have been delivered; the money he's received is a pittance. This operation had been intended to go on indefinitely; there should have been no limit to his profit.

Should he pull out? Should he hold fast and hope for the best? Should he make delivery now, get what he can from a dissatisfied client and vanish?

Should he?

xxx

Siobhan O'Mallory, approaching the Holding Cell in the lower level, sees DiNozzo just coming out of the room.

She can't help but notice that this time it takes the man's eyes four seconds to rise from her pale blue shirt up past the encircling white collar to her face. Frequently it's more than five, with occasional glances he's undoubtedly sure she doesn't notice. By the time she reaches him, he is looking into her eyes.

She knows the time is coming when she must address this. She'd hoped he would outgrow the inclination, sparing them both an uncomfortable conversation, but this hasn't worked.

On the day they'd met, she knew his eyes had been petting her from behind. When she'd turned and his eyes had lit upon her white collar, she'd enjoyed the unguarded disconcertion in them, and had that been the end she'd have taken the lesson as learned, but it hasn't been.

Timmy's team all reacted to her in various ways. Special Agent Gibbs barely relates to her. Their association had begun as witness and investigator, had grown adversarial for a time, now they are colleagues and he treats her as such; more, she suspects, because he cannot do anything about it. They'd officially 'cleared the air' not long after her appointment, but he still treats her in a strictly professional manner when he interacts with her at all.

Ziva David had treated her initially as a rival, then an almost-friend, and now cannot bring herself to be more than coldly civil to her at the best of times. Michelle Lee regards her with the utmost respect and forbearance, thoroughly aware of her station and Calling, though Siobhan could wish for a little more casual relationship.

Anthony DiNozzo, on the other hand, has never moved from the stage of viewing her as a sex object. Oh, he'd made an effort, to be sure, but in the end he saw her as a woman before a priest. She knows he's in a fairly committed relationship with his girlfriend Dr. Jeanne Benoit after a short break. She is not privy as to why, only that it was somehow case-related, but she has given the man more than a little slack. He's used it to grow worse rather than better, so his leeway is rapidly shrinking.

In some ways, his view might be a refreshing change from the high formality with which she's regarded by the public, if only it were tempered with a little more discretion, but he takes that lack of forbearance a little too far. In a sense, he's always seen her as she'd once wished Timmy would, but she's uncomfortable that he can _only_ seem to see her so.

He never crosses the line, in word or action; he does have more decorum and respect than that, not to mention intelligence and a sense of self-preservation. On the other hand, she never wants to know what is going on in his mind or dreams!

"How is she?" she asks him, trying to focus solely on the one who actually needs her.

x

"She won't let me come anywhere near her," he tells her, trying to keep his eyes on hers. She is so attractive, despite the formal attire she wears; black pants, pale blue shirt and the white collar that always reminds him how far out of reach she is, that it's sometimes difficult to concentrate. Sometimes he wonders if McGee really knows what he has. At others, he wishes the man would completely foul up as he had with Ziva. "She almost went hysterical the moment I walked in."

"I wonder why."

Though her tone is serious and speculative, her smile belies that. Once again DiNozzo is left to wonder about the woman. Her talent for being sincere and yet teasing is an interesting foil he'd encountered numerous times since their first inauspicious meeting. The score so far, he reckons, is O'Mallory 17, DiNozzo 0.

"McGee got you to help out?" he concludes, not wanting to get into another round with her, confident he will lose – again.

"Timmy feels I can get through to her, that she'll see me as less of a threat."

"I'm not sure she could see anyone as 'less of a threat', but the Probette was about done in. I came to relieve her but I think it's too late. I need to get a medical team down here."

"Why?"

"She's starting to go into withdrawal. They addicted her to a date rape drug, Rohypnol. We had a window when she was lucid; but it's closing."

"How much longer?"

"From what I've seen, maybe an hour, an hour and a half tops. If you're going in, you'd better go."

"Thanks," she says, not at all grateful, bracing herself as she reaches for the doorknob, pushing the door open.

"Good luck, Shav."

Halfway through she stops – hard.

x

Very slowly she turns toward the tall man; her eyes bore into his but she allows no emotion to enter them. She reaches up, adjusts her glasses on the bridge of her nose, does not say a word but continues to stare at him.

Under her steady, silent gaze he finally looks away, driven away, and walks down the corridor.

Taking a deep, calming breath, she enters the room.

x

Siobhan believed she was prepared, based on Timmy's description, for the sight of the woman, but she has to admit nothing could have adequately prepared her for this. Seated in a folding chair is the most astonishing young woman Siobhan had ever imagined meeting. The rosy pink, the blue eyespots and black and white ermine which surrounds all are such an astonishing combination that all she is able to say is "Hi."

The woman Timmy'd called Crystal turns red eyes to her. She may appear at first glance to be fairy-like; but huddled in the chair, wearing blue scrubs that are too large; she appears more forlorn than spritely.

As soon as she sees Britizze's eyes, the glistening perspiration upon her face, the way she huddles into the chair, Siobhan is angry. What's been done to this woman is worse than Timmy had spoken of, and even Agent DiNozzo's warning didn't convey all the distress. From what she's seen in her own experience with addicts, DiNozzo's guess of an hour or more was optimistic.

"Who're you?"

Siobhan is surprised at the depth of mistrust in the woman's eyes and the coldness of her tone, but she supposes her suspicion of strangers is certainly warranted. She decides to keep it simple. "I'm Chaplain O'Mallory."

"You're a priest?"

Siobhan is well familiar with the dubious tone. "Episcopal."

"Why?"

The question is as open ended as one can get. "Why what?"

"Why are you here?"

"To try to help you."

"What can _you_ do?"

"I can listen – if you want to talk."

x

"Everyone thinks talking will help. But it won't, will it? Look at me."

Siobhan studiously refrains from glancing at the wings, holding her concentration on the woman's eyes. "Ti– Agent McGee told me you don't remember anything about what happened to you?"

She shakes her head. "It's a blur, a horrible jumble. I remember being naked – all the time naked – while those men did _this_ to me!" She waves her hand viciously at the huge wings. "They tell me I was kept high on a date rape drug. I don't know if they raped me – I'm sure they did and I don't remember any of it. But they did _this_! I don't even know _why_!"

She stares down at her clenched hands, not sure why she's talking to the strange, red haired woman 'priest'; only that the words spill out. She needs the words to spill out.

"I came out of it sometimes. I'd see the others, like me. Once in a while I could see someone in one of the other cells, someone else aware. The clear booths we were in, row after row, I could see the other girls…." Britizze starts to cry, bitter tears slip down her cheeks. "The men let us talk, they didn't care, I think. Once in a while I'd see someone who wasn't drugged, learn her name. No one knew why they did this to us. No one knew. They put these _things_ on us and none of us knew _why_! They made angels and butterflies and birds and … and … I don't know what else. But once in a while I'd come out of it and someone would be gone and no one ever answered my questions. No one ever _answered_!"

"You told Special Agent Gibbs you thought you were being sold."

She shakes her head. "Only thing that makes sense. But _nothing_ makes sense. I keep asking why they did this to me, no one will tell me. Even here, no one will tell me. I don't know what to do. _I don't know what to_ _do_."

x

Siobhan watches the crying woman for several moments, trying to keep her own heart from breaking. She pulls her cell phone from her pocket, holds it to Britizze. "Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone you want to know you're all right?" She knows Gibbs will probably be angry; he clearly has his own schedule and priorities. She's never given a damn.

The question seems to get her attention, but Britizze shakes her head. "My mother…."

When she makes no move to take the phone, Siobhan asks, "What's the number?"

She shakes her head again. "No. I can't. She'll freak! How can I explain this? How can I let my mother see _these_?"

"You can let her know you're alive and well. The wings can come later."

But Britizze continues to shake her head, and makes no move to reach for the phone.


	7. The Blue Wall

Chapter Seven  
The Blue Wall

Abby carries her cold 'Munsters' lunchbox into the employee lounge. It's well past lunchtime but this is the first opportunity she's had for a break. She still has a stack of evidence to test, several items in various stages of completion.

Never one for the random chance of eating the café food, she prefers to bring food she can depend upon. Even when it is not wholly healthy, it's what she likes, which is something the café cannot seem to manage with any reasonable regularity.

Normally she would spread a mini-picnic lunch on one of the checkerboard inlayed tabletops, this time she's in the mood for company. Company is not in short supply, but the one she chooses is Michelle Lee, seated in a corner of the room surrounded by magazines on the table pulled up before her and upon the seats to either side. As Abby approaches, she finds the younger woman flipping through page after page of remarkably similar photos. Every one of the publications that surrounds her is a Bridal magazine. "Choosing a gown?"

Michelle looks up, surprised at the interruption. "Hi, Abby." The dark woman is one of only four people in NCIS that she feels comfortable addressing by first name, the other three being Jimmy, of course, Tim and after long and intense effort, Dr. Mallar – Ducky. "Taking a break. Agent DiNozzo relieved me for an hour, I had to get out of there, get my mind onto something else for a while. He told me Mother O'Mallory is on her way in to help."

"I wonder what she'll think of Crystal."

Michelle looks up at her, smiling. "I'll bet she'll be surprised."

"I'm sure." She eyes the magazines. "So?"

Michelle sighs. "Failing to choose, actually," she admits, answering the question she'd actually been asked. She closes the magazine and deposits it with its four fellows on the low table before her before clearing the seat to her right.

Abby sits down beside her, setting her lunchbox on a clear corner of the table. "Day's coming up soon, isn't it?"

"The _Day_," she says ruefully, "is nearly six months away, May first. I haven't mentioned Beltane to him, I didn't want to freak him out but that's why I chose it. It's a major Wiccan feast, the celebration of spring, new life and fertility. But I'm _never_ going to be ready. I'd been so set on a Wiccan wedding, there was no way I was going to get married in a Church with all its pompous circumstance," she exchanges a quick, companionable grin with her friend, "but the more I talk to my friends … I'm going _nuts_ talking to my friends."

"Hey, this is _your_ day. You plan it like you want."

x

Michelle takes a deep breath, "I was just going for a nice simple dress, I'd wear garlands in my hair for a sign of fertility, we'd do it in a field on Beltane, May Day; we were going to write our own vows because I couldn't say those traditional ones when I see so many people it doesn't last with. My mother, good Episcopalian convert that she is, nearly had a heart attack, so we're going to do it in Saint Mary's, Mother O'Mallory will do the ceremony, Jimmy has asked Ducky to be his Best Man, he's got the ring all picked out and would you be my Maid of Honor?"

It takes the impressed scientist a moment, when Michelle stops speaking, to realize there had been a significant question at the end of that two breath deluge.

"A – sure – I'd be honored – thank you."

"I've been trying to ask for weeks, couldn't think of how. Finally I decided just blurting it out works the best."

"You're a trip, Michelle." Friendship with the witch is never boring.

"We have to figure out what to wear," Michelle says as she reaches for the top magazine, grateful that now the decision is no longer hers alone. "You can't wear black."

"I would _never_ wear black to a wedding," Abby assures her.

"That's good to know."

"_Off_ black," she determines, reminding herself of Morticia Addams. She ignores Michelle's half-glare, searching with her through the pages.

xxx

Two hours later Abby is hard at work in her lab when she hears the glass doors leading to the elevator slide apart behind her. "Hi, Gibbs," she calls.

"How did you know it was me?"

"Because I just found something, and whenever I find something you arrive. I told you, that's LAbby Rule Number One."

"I always thought of it as forcing you to produce results."

"However you want to look at it, I have results," her smile is utterly satisfied.

"Lay it on me."

"You'll get dirty," she assures him, "because what I found will get all over your nice suit."

"Abby."

She leads him to her worktable, upon which stand a pair of men's shoes. "Lieutenant Cavaluzzi's shoes," she turns them over, "notice anything about them?"

They are scuffed, discolored from steady wear, but on the whole, "No."

"That's because you're not looking at them under a microscope."

x

While he occasionally appreciates and indulges her playful moods, it's been a long day replete with questions but with a dearth of answers, which he hastens to remind her. Rather than apologizing – a sign of weakness – she leads him over to her workstation. "Have a peek."

He bends over and adjusts the focus of the device. Several adjustments leave him unenlightened. The images under the lens are raw, rough and mysterious. He straightens. "What am I peeking at?"

"Wood dust."

"Sawdust?"

"No, Gibbs, wood dust, tiny itty bitty fragments of wood but not the powdery kinds like you get from your boat."

He tries to let his glare say 'you couldn't just tell me this?' but she switches slides.

"This one is carpet fibers from beside his bed." He looks again, adjusting the focus. In the midst of the softer fibers are the same distinctive sharp edged ones. "I also have slides taken from the floor of the van, from the carpet just inside his house and from spots leading directly to the bedroom. There's hardly any point in showing you when I can just tell you there's a steady decrease in these tiny wood fragments from the van to the door to the bedroom, but still a significant trace all the way to where he would take off his shoes each evening.

"They also change in quality and texture, all over a definite period; the traces are layered one atop another. He's been tracking through this wood dust steadily for months, and I doubt they've been coming from Quantico Medical."

xxx

"Boss," DiNozzo reports when he sees Gibbs coming off the elevator. "Medical just called, they had to take Britizze."

"The withdrawals?"

"Full blown. She had to be carried out."

It is with great effort that Gibbs restrains a very earthy reply. Their window has closed and Britizze, who has been abused to an unimaginable degree for seven months, is suffering again.

"A Doctor Charles Kendrick is holding for you and Ducky in MTAC." McGee reports.

"Get Ducky up here."

"He's already there."

"When I get back, you'd better have some answers from that diary."

x

When Gibbs enters MTAC the huge screen is already active, Ducky is conversing with the man they'd met with several hours ago. Once again the view is of a book lined study, this time the man is in evening clothes and his manner is considerably subdued. "Agent Gibbs?" he acknowledges when the Investigator reaches the bottom of the ramp.

"Doctor."

"Ducky and I were just catching up on old times. I felt it best to wait until you were both together before going into this unpleasantness.

"And what 'unpleasantness' is that?"

Kendrick is even more uncomfortable. "I believe I have an answer to your question earlier. Several months ago stories came to my attention regarding some practices of a particularly unsavory nature."

Gibbs is beginning to recognize and appreciate Ducky's style of presentation. He hopes this man doesn't share the Medical Examiner's gift for divergence.

"There are, as you can appreciate, gentlemen of considerable wealth and power, some few of whom possess certain idiosyncrasies which you and I might consider distasteful."

"Such as?" He has never appreciated Ducky more than now. The M.E. at least comes to the point.

"Such as the attainment of the … unusual, the unique – even if not through the most legal means."

"Like kidnapping beautiful women, grafting wings onto them and selling them as slaves."

Kendrick winces at the American bluntness, but finally must admit: "Quite."

x

"Where would we find some of these slave merchants?" Gibbs can tell from the man's strained expression that he doesn't consider this the most delicate way of putting the question. He doesn't give a damn.

"The man I am thinking of – and mind you I have no proof – would not be the 'merchant' as you put it, but the end buyer. And bear in mind I have little more than stories that come to me third han–."

"And who might these 'stories' be about?"

"Jethro," Ducky sounds about to appeal for discretion, Gibbs raises a hand to silence him.

"Come on, doc. Talk to us."

"One does not besmirch a gentleman's reputation without warrant, but I have heard stories about a Mr. Robert Carey which seem to cast his reputation in a questionable light."

"And where might I find this Carey?"

"You would not. He has an estate somewhere on the Culloden moor; not too far north of Loch Ashie, from what I understand. I am not certain exactly where it is, but I have heard that as a visitor you would be most unwelcome."

"I don't intend to drop in on Scotland, Doctor." If any Special Agent does go, it won't be him, but he's not in the mood to elucidate. "Why do you think he might have something to do with this?"

"I don't, not actually. Shall we say he has a reputation for interest in the … unusual? I cannot say definitely that he might know anything about your case, simply that … he might."

"All right, Doctor, thank you." Gibbs senses he has dragged as much out of the man as he is going to, and has had his fill of this waffling. He'd much rather get answers from a source he knows he can depend upon.

"Goodbye, Charles. I'll keep in touch. Give my best to Annette."

"I shall. Goodnight, Ducky." He reaches for a control. Gibbs is glad to see the screen go dark.

x

"What do you make of that?"

"Charles would never have mentioned Robert Carey if he were not certain that what he knew was valid."

"Ever hear of him?"

"Not personally, no. There is a historical figure of some significance by that name, connected with the death of Elizabeth I and the succession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in the 1580's. I cannot say there is any relation at all, but the Carey name is significant in the British Isles, where it commands considerable respect."

Interesting though this is, he does not want to get sidetracked based on hearsay. "Duck, I'm not sure what time it is in Scotland but over here it's been a long day."

Ducky glances at his watch. "I should say just going on 10:30pm. They are, of course, five hours ahead of us."

He restrains a sigh. He hadn't really wanted to know, but learning it was unavoidable. "What have you got on either Cavaluzzi?"

Ducky starts up the ramp, obliging Gibbs to join him. He doesn't feel comfortable in MTAC, the mass of technology is too far removed from the personal contact he's used to in his own domain, regardless of the dearth of conversation other than with Mr. Palmer. "Each was killed by gunfire," he explains as they exit the complex onto the balcony which overlooks the Squad Room, "but in Mrs. Cavaluzzi's case this was rather extreme. He was shot at long range one time in the abdomen, no gunshot residue; she twenty times in the left pectoral region at close range, considerable GSR. According to Abby, the bullets definitely did not come from the same weapon, though the result was very much the same."

Gibbs needs far more than gunshot residue to solve this case, but before he can ask for more, McGee's voice rises from the level below. "Boss?"

"What is it?" Gibbs calls down.

"I found something in the diary that might be useful." Gibbs wastes no time arriving at the man's desk. Ducky, innately curious, is just a few feet behind.

"What?"

"There are various directories to the journal. It's not as though he were keeping a single log. Basically it's divided into sections that depend upon–"

"McGee?"

"Yes, boss?"

"You're already on overtime. If you don't want me to sign you out so you're working for free, get to the point."

x

"Well," he calls up a graphical representation of the hard drive, the journal directory is divided into icons that represent 'Work', 'Family', 'Personal' and 'B.L.' "the reason it took so long to get through this is that everything is encrypted differently. After 'Work', which runs several years of entries, I had a choice but 'B.L.' seemed vague enough to attract my attention."

"Yeah, well I can see that." The appellation had attracted his as well. "What did you find?"

"B.L." he clicks on the directory, opening it up. In the upper left corner of the screen is a familiar gold on blue emblem, somewhat antique, "stands for 'Blue Lodge'." He turns to look up at Gibbs, "Cavaluzzi is a Freemason."

"That explains all the secrecy," DiNozzo says, looking on from his own desk. "Those guys invented the word."

"Maybe so, maybe not," McGee counters. "The point is there's a lot of material here that, when decrypted, is pretty much just social, but it does mention that he is a member of Harmony Lodge 2199 – and it meets tonight, in a little over two hours."

"With his wife dead, those people are probably the ones who would know the most about him."

"Good luck getting them to admit it," DiNozzo continues, undaunted. "I've dealt with those guys; they make the Blue Wall of Silence in Metro PD sound like the New York Stock Market."

"Not really, Anthony;" Ducky counters; "sometimes it's just a matter of knowing what to say."

"Well, I'm willing to give it a try," he says, recalling his own Frat days but doubting there are in any way similar. "I'd love to tear down the wall of secrecy for just a moment, but those meetings are 'members only'. We go in there to interrogate the Grand Poobah and they'll clam up like oysters."

Gibbs shakes his head, wondering if it is worth it to walk over just for a head slap. "I'm not going to go in to _interrogate_ anybody. I'm just going to go down and have a chat."

"You'll do better sending in a member."

"All right, DiNozzo, you're so smart, you've got two hours. Find me a Mason."

xxx

Three and a half hours later Gibbs, by no means surprised that DiNozzo, for all his certainty, has failed to locate an agent who is a member of this group, sits in his car across the street from the distinctive building. The 'Temple' where Washington's Masons hold their meetings is both ornate and impressive. He'd often heard of the Washington Masonic Memorial not far away in Alexandria but had never visited it. Now he waits across the street from a less impressive structure, though one he's sure is no less secure.

If he had any reason at all to suspect that any of the men inside knew anything about Lt. Cavaluzzi's death, he wouldn't hesitate to enter in force. Without such evidence, the old adage of being able to get more with a carrot than a stick definitely applies. He will wait until the men are done with whatever formality they engage in; then he'll enter and politely ask.

He has less time to wait than he'd anticipated, for at 9:39 the front door opens and a man steps out. He descends the steps and turns left, buttoning his overcoat against the nighttime chill. Gibbs decides this man is the most likely first choice and starts his car, coming out of his parking space and moving slowly until he's beside the man. Lowering the window, he calls, "Give you a lift?"

The man looks at him, tilting his hat back an inch. "My car is just on the next street."

"Hop in. It's a cool night, wouldn't want you to get a chill."

The man considers for a moment, then comes around the front of the car, opens the door and gets in. "Thank you. There is a bit of a nip in the air."

"So, where are you parked? Or should we just drive around while you tell me what you know? Like why you never told me you're a Mason."

"Come now, Jethro, you know I'm not much of a talker," Dr. Donald Mallard chides his old friend.


	8. On the Square

Chapter Eight  
On the Square

"It's a good thing we're not moving. That one might make me drive right off the street."

"Well, discretion is always the better part – and so forth."

"How long have you been discreet?"

"Jethro, please," Ducky says, feigning a wound, but then he smiles. "Some 39 years. I do not get out much these days as I cannot leave mother unattended for the time it would take, but I do maintain my membership in my Mother Lodge in Edinburgh. Getting out tonight was a rare treat, I assure you."

"Who's watching your mother?"

"I asked Mr. Palmer and Agent Lee to look in on her in my absence."

"What did they ever do to you?" he quips, Mrs. Mallard being a formidable challenge at the best of times.

"I should be getting back to relieve them,"

"I'm sure they'll be very relieved."

"But first to business," Ducky turns slightly in the seat, getting comfortable. "As you might imagine, the brothers of Harmony Lodge, of which Lt. Cavaluzzi is a Past Master, were quite surprised to hear of his demise. The information had come from the husband of Mrs. Pamela Costello, who you met at the Cavaluzzi home. He, not at all coincidently, is also a member. Brother Cavaluzzi, I understand, brought Brother Costello into the Lodge some four years ago.

"At any rate, after a moment of prayer for the repose of their souls offered by the Chaplain and a period of silence together with other traditional formalities associated with a departed Brother; the members, following a tradition in this Lodge, spoke briefly in turn on recollections of Worshipful Brother Cavaluzzi. Their insights were particularly illuminating, I assure you. I, as a visitor, contrived to go last, though I had hardly been expected to have any recollections at all to offer.

"However, when I let slip that I am the Medical Examiner investigating their friend's death, you may imagine the conversation became considerably more intense and protracted."

"I guess it did." He wonders if it was any more protracted than the explanation. He might have faulted Ducky for this obviously intentional revelation, but will reserve judgment until he learns what came of it. He supposes his old friend was not likely to lie about the connection that had brought him here tonight.

"I was in an excellent position to observe every man in the room and I can assure you they were all surprised and distressed about both deaths, their concern for young Nicole equally sincere. However, I did manage, with the assistance of the Lodge Master, to make certain that I received as much information as I dispensed, though I assure you I was appropriately discreet.

"I did learn, however, that over the past several months the Lieutenant has been noticeably stressed, this fact being related by several of his friends. He had confessed to being pressured into doing something he found quite objectionable, though the nature of it was something he would not reveal. It does, however, appear to have been an escalating problem."

"Do you think he was feeling guilty about something?"

"I do."

"Do they have any idea what?"

"I cannot say for certain, but I suspect that Albert Costello might be closest to the problem, in a number of senses."

"Sounds like I should have a talk with this 'Brother Costello'."

"My thoughts, exactly, when I requested them to await my return. I anticipated that you would be 'staked out' somewhere close by. He is waiting for us inside."

xx

There are times that Leroy Jethro Gibbs feels himself to be the victim of either subtle or overt manipulation. Most times he resents it, this time he does not, not when it is orchestrated by his old friend who certainly wanted a chance to present his own testimony before passing the floor on to someone else.

As they enter the building, Gibbs looks forward to hearing this news.

The interior has a stately feel enhanced by antique furniture and of oak paneled walls, on which are prominently displayed portraits of dignitaries whose contributions to the organization are best known to those who knew them. These are interspersed with such a wide collection of memorabilia that Gibbs wonders if anyone could take all the time needed to review it in one visit.

The impressive accoutrements are continued on the walls of the large room on the lower level, where some fifteen men are gathered over refreshments of coffee and sandwiches. Introductions, conducted by Ducky, are cordial though brief; he doesn't proceed through these directly around the table, so they're determined by a particular protocol unfamiliar to Gibbs. In reasonable time he is seated across the table from a man who is eerily similar to what he imagines a fifty year old DiNozzo would be.

"Art's been pretty keyed up for a couple of weeks, not himself at all. Every summer we would go out; there'd be football, baseball, bowling…. When you're in Lodge together twice a month and live back to back you see a lot of each other, not just over mowing lawns like other guys, if you know what I mean." Gibbs just nods; non-committal.

"This summer, none of it. Whenever I brung it up he always had to work, but I can tell he's lying."

"How?" He knows the answer with regard to himself, he wants to hear Costello's.

"When you know a man, sometimes it gets under your skin an' you know when he's not being Square. He was keepin' somethin' from me. I didn't mind, it was his business an' I have plenty of friends, but he wasn't bein' … upright, if you get me. I didn't think he was seein' anyone. He an' I did talk on the Square an' I'd have known if he was steppin' out on Lydia.

"He wasn't gettin' it anywhere else; he was too tense for that. When a man's gettin' it, no matter where, he's not that tense all the time.

"No, something was eatin' at him, something bad. He had one hell of a demon on his shoulder."

"You never found out what?"

"No, but I can tell you this, about two days ago I saw him an' the demon was gone."

"What do you mean?"

"It was like this big change came over him an' he wasn't tense anymore. You know, like when you got a problem that's just eatin' at you for so long and then you make a decision. Lookin' back, I think that's what happened to Art. All summer an' fall, then he finally made a decision."

xxx

Standing outside Ducky's Morgan parked a block from the Masonic Temple at 11:00, Gibbs and Ducky consider the testimony of Albert Costello as well as those of the other men. "He made a decision."

"I suspect, Jethro, I know what that decision might be."

"We're probably thinking the same thing, and from what I have been hearing we have a good range for McGee to concentrate on, early Summer onward. What's your take?"

"My 'take' is that he got drawn into something that so disturbed his conscience that he could no longer endure it. I suspect his medical skills were being used with these poor women. We have adequate indication as to what his decision was."

"He tried to bust one of them out, probably was on his way to us, got shot and died a mile from the Navy Yard."

"Sadly, he left us with no clues as to where this mysterious place is."

"Maybe he did." He pulls out his cell phone, not minding that McGee isn't going to be happy.

xx

Tim McGee is already on his cell phone. He is lying on his bed, clad in tee shirt and boxers, staring up at the ceiling; phone pressed to his ear and his timbre is far removed from those any of his co-workers ever hear. "I'm just sorry I had to pull you out like that, honey."

/No, a chuisle, you did the right thing./ It has been many years since she had been able to freely address him as 'my darling' - literally 'my pulse'. It feels good to do it. Lately she has been able to say more to Timmy in the language of their heritage, teaching him so they may be able to exchange such things as endearments – and more – in privacy. /I was happy to help, for all that I could do./

"I just wish we could have had some time to spend together." Though the priest and their unique witness had spent a short time together before the medics had taken her, Siobhan had not been able to stay after bringing Michelle Lee up to date, for what little she could say. There were too many pressing obligations back at the office. She'd taken the metro back to within walking distance of the church rather than obliging him to drive her back. He would have done so gladly, but she needed the time to think on what she had seen.

/We still have tomorrow evening. That is, if you solve the case in time./

"If only things like that _could_ be done between commercials." Regrettably, the conveniences – and unrealities – of television don't extend into real life.

/How close are you?/

"How far, you mean. Abby was saying she wishes Britizze had some clothes she could test. It would help to compare hers to Lieutenant Cavaluzzi's, see what they have in common. You're _sure_ she couldn't remember anything?"

/Oh, she told me all about what she went through. I just didn't bother to tell any of you./

He winces at the annoyance in her tone. "I'm sorry."

She sighs into his ear. /No, _I'm_ sorry, that was bitchy. It's just that what they put her through –/

"I know."

/You sound tired./

"Call it tension exhaustion. Gibbs'll be on me soon and I have nothing more to give him. I'm lying in bed wondering what more I can do – and I'm not getting anywhere."

/You're talking to me from bed? How indulgent of you./

"What are you doing?"

There is a long pause, and then he can virtually hear the smile in her tone.

/I'm in bed too./

"What're you wearing?"

/Now never you mind. You are supposed to be a fine, upstanding Christian gentleman. Have all my efforts to redeem you been wasted?/

"Totally. There is just something wrong with this, both of us in bed and so far apart. I should get dressed and come over."

/Be ye of good moral character, o man./

"When have you known me to be a man of good moral character?"

/Good point. You are definitely a sinner in need of saving./

"I place myself entirely in your hands."

/If you remember the Inquisition, you wouldn't be saying that, ghile mear./

"God, even your teasing sounds so sexy."

/Go to bed!/

"I'm in bed. I'm just wondering which of us is going to get _out_ of bed to–"

/A true gentleman wouldn't even ask./

"_Sure_, I can see myself sneaking into the Rectory at this hour. Father Donaldson catches me; I'll never be able to explain it."

/Well, you know I can't./

x

Even though months ago she had called him late in the night pleading for help, she couldn't meet him in her former apartment, having to be so careful of her public reputation. Now, though they're openly dating, she must still be cautious, careful of the same concerns.

"I know. Sometimes I truly wish…"

/You're flirting with a need to meet me for confession./

"I told you once I'd love to get you in a dark booth sometime."

/That you did./

"We can renew old times."

She laughs. /That's the difference between seeing someone new and an old love./

"What?"

/They can only guess what gets to you. I _know_./

"I'll be right over."

/Timmy!/

He can hear the sharp apprehension, the fear in her voice. It's _not_ the emotion he had hoped to raise. "What's wrong?"

/I'm sorry, I – I still can't. Whitney, the elevator, it's too close – too soon. I know it's not you – but every time I think of–!/

"I'm sorry. I'm an idiot." To be trapped in an elevator and barely escaping rape is horrible enough, but to believe he is the one who had done it…

/No, you're not an idiot. I just … need more time, okay?/

"Okay, no pressure, I swear. It'll be just like when we were dating before."

/In High School you were a _satyr_, and I don't believe you've reformed any!/

"I have so." He is relieved, however, to hear her teasing tone. Anything is better than the apprehension.

/I don't know. Abby has some interesting stories./

Now it's his turn to be apprehensive. "What have you heard?"

/Someday I might tell you./

He can virtually hear her grin. "But –" a double beep sounds in his ear and he looks at the small screen on the phone. "Ohh, I don't _believe_ it!"

/What is it?/

"I think I have to go. Please don't go away, I'll be right back."

His tone is enough to tell her who is calling so late at night. /I'll be waiting./ She makes the promise sound as delicious as possible.

x

Reluctantly he presses the button. "McGee."

/What took you so long?/

"I was in the middle of negotiations."

/_What_ negotiations?/

"Never mind," he tries to keep the sigh from his tone, "it's nothing." He and Siobhan may have had a physical relationship in the distant past; that is something that has not followed them into the present. While he could hope, he knows it will be a long time before …. "What do you need?"

/I need you to go back into the B.L. thingy, see if you can find where these girls are being held./

"I've been doing that all day."

/This time I need you to find it./

xx

Siobhan holds the phone to her ear even as she moves to adjust the blue pajamas about her body so she may be comfortable. As she settles back down again, pulling the blanket back over herself, the phone comes back on.

/I'm sorry, Shav,/ Timmy's voice sounds in her ear, /I have to go./

"What's wrong?"

/Gibbs wants me to get on something right away./

"Can't be as comfortable as what you were _hoping_ to get on," she assures him with a smile.

/It's _not_./

"I'm sorry."

/What for?/

She lowers her voice to a seductive purr. "That you couldn't come over; this pink fly-away and thong are just soooo sexy."

She presses the 'disconnect' button, grinning as she turns the cell phone off, puts it on her night table and switches off the lamp.

xxx

Donald Mallard enters the base Infirmary, unbuttoning his long overcoat and removing his fedora before addressing the Hospital Corpswoman at the front desk. "I'm here to check up on Ms. Britizze."

The blue uniformed petty officer looks up from the report upon her desk, brushing a lock of her black hair from where it had fallen across her left eye. She's not overly surprised by the post-midnight visitor, this Medical Facility seems always to be exempt from sane hours, and the man before her is no stranger. "Yes, Doctor Mallard, she's in lockdown pending transfer to Bethesda." The woman stands up, preparing to lead him down the corridor behind her.

"How is she?"

"She's in Level One withdrawal from heavy concentrations of Flunitrazepam. Doctor Uraldi felt that after the strain her body has been under it was best not to give her any additional medications until this is flushed from her system."

Ducky can see the woman is no happier with this than he is. "What about–?"

"We were going to," she says, anticipating his prescriptive thought of the most common alternative. "She's allergic to it. We'd only make things worse."

Even down the corridor there is no doubt as to which room contains his patient; screams of agony announce her distress throughout the section. When he opens the door, her shrieks mount to earsplitting volume. There are two female orderlies in the room. Britizze lies face down on the bed, her wrists and ankles bound to padded restraints at the head and foot of the bed. The bed itself is in the middle of the room to accommodate the nearly seven foot span of her wings.

He knows the women are there to act should it be necessary to tranquilize Britizze if her withdrawal pain grows to be more than she can tolerate or something else go wrong. Considering her allergic constraints however, all they can do is wait. He can see in their eyes what the woman's suffering is doing to them.

Britizze writhes in her restraints, her face buried into her pillow, her screams barely muffled. He crouches low beside the bed. "Crystal?"

She looks up and he almost considers it a good sign that she responds to her name until he sees her face. It is gaunt and strained, her pain etched upon it. "_You said you would help me_!" Her accusing cry stabs at his heart.

"We are trying, my dear. The drug they were using on yo–." His voice is drowned out by her scream as her body convulses upon the bed, arms and legs pulling at the restraints as she tries to curl up from the pain.

xxx

State Department Assistant Deputy Rawlings looks out from the huge MTAC screen at Gibbs and Director Shepherd, his pen poised over a document on his desk, his manner displaying his annoyance at the initial interruption. He has not removed the pen from paper for the past ten minutes, managing to give the impression that it is more important to him than the concerns of the NCIS agents on his monitor screen.

For Gibbs and Shepherd it has been a long and stressful night, and the morning brings no bright hope with it. It does, however, bring bright sunshine through the window behind the man onto the monitor on his desk, a considerable annoyance they are certain he's aware of.

"Let me see if I have this straight," Rawlings says shortly. There is not a lot to keep straight, but he says it anyway. "You suspect a foreign national, a distinguished citizen of the United Kingdom, of running what amounts to a 'white slavery' ring in Scotland."

"We do, sir." Shepherd says, managing to keep from revealing on her face the sour taste of the honorific.

"I trust you have sufficient proof, Director?"

'No', she thinks, 'I'm just calling you up at one minute after nine in the morning because I have nothing else to do while my coffee brews.' "We have a young woman who has been rescued after being kidnapped and surgically altered, huge butterfly wings having been grafted into her back. We also have a dead Navy doctor we suspect of playing a part in the scheme and a reliable informant who alerted us to certain predilections concerning our suspect."

x

Gibbs glances at her. Had they been alone and she used a word like that, he would be inclined to fine her three dollars. However, the pretentiousness of the man seems to fit well with the word; his job, Gibbs judges, seems to be to find new and inspired ways of saying 'no'.

"And you want permission from the State Department to send someone to investigate the Honorable Robert Carey."

"Yes." This is the first time they'd heard this particular honorific. Each looks forward to hearing what makes him so 'honorable'.

"What can you tell me of this supposed victim?"

"The '_supposed_ victim' is a young college student by the _name_ of Crystal Britizze." She sees the beginning of a smile on the man's face and wishes she was close enough to smack it. "She was kidnapped from her dorm in late April and found wandering the side of Highway 395 yesterday morning."

"What has she told you about Mr. Carey?"

"Unfortunately, she has no information on Carey, and could provide us with little more about what she went through before being confined to the Infirmary. She is presently undergoing treatment and can no longer tell us anything."

"Very unfortunate."

"Very."

"And what about this Navy doctor? What has he told you?"

"The _dead_ Navy doctor?" she reminds him sharply. "Not a lot, but that does have quite a bit to do with his being dead."

"Yes," he does at least look embarrassed, "well, be that as it may…"

"We did learn enough to make us believe he was applying his skills toward the medical treatment of Ms. Britizze and the other kidnap victims."

"But being dead, it makes it hard to interrogate him, I see. Except, of course, for the inquisition skills of the infamous Ducky Mallard."

x

"Mister Rawlings–!" It is hard enough to contain her temper without this officious twerp mocking her staff.

"How many other supposed victims are there in this scheme?"

"We don't know; there are indications there are others. Britizze's testimony accounts for at least one other. Numerous other young women are also unaccounted for in the same area–."

"Yes, young beautiful girls are frequently 'unaccounted for'."

Shepherd's hands, kept scrupulously at her sides, hurt from the nails dug into the palms of her clenched fists. She has tried, and continues to try very hard to keep a professional tone, to remember she has come to this 'gentleman' to ask his help.

"We have evidence that suggests Robert Carey of Culloden Moor is connected with this, either as funder of the operation or ultimate buyer of these young women."

"'Ultimate buyer'? And what do you believe he might be buying them for?"

"I shudder to think. We do, however, need the assistance of the State Department in finding out."

x

Rawlings closes the file on his desk, and they sense he's about to launch into his most eloquent rendition of 'no'. "I'm sorry, but you've offered no proof of these allegations. Mr. Carey, in case you do not already know, is a person of some considerable note in the United Kingdom. Aside from being a Peer of the Realm, he is prominent on the Boards of numerous corporations, all of which do extensive business with the U.S. Government, to say nothing of their concerns with private enterprise. If this in itself were not significant, he holds numerous key positions in the British and Scottish Governments and is held in high regard by many Influential Friends of the United States."

They can virtually hear the capitals. "So the State Department is not going to assist us in this case."

"You have provided virtually no evidence that there is a case that involves the Government of the United States, or of the United Kingdom for that matter."

"You do realize that we contacted the State Department as the first step in obtaining that evidence. _I_, however, cannot miss that you are quite informed of the details regarding Mr. Carey's position, a fact I would not have expected considering we have just come to you this morning."

"Yes, well, we were acquainted with the gentleman for quite some time."

"Do tell."

"I'm afraid I cannot. There are certain … curiosities regarding Mr. Carey, things I am unable to get into at this point in time."

"At this point in time," Jenny repeats scathingly. "At this point in _time_ we have a woman who has been subjected to almost unimaginable torment; indications that she is one of an unknown number of American citizens so treated, together with a murdered United States Navy Officer and his murdered wife. You do not seem surprised by the situation, despite the fact that when I was apprised of it I assure you _I_ was deeply surprised. I don't know why the State Department has him on its radar and frankly I don't care; I came to you for help in securing information about what is going on in Scotland."

"Director Shepherd, you must understand the political situation that presently exists between the United States and the United Kingdom at this time."

"Assistant Director Rawlings, one of the reasons I was made Director of this Agency is that I am very well versed on political situations and how to handle them. Lately, however, when someone starts out by saying I have to understand the complex political situations involved in an investigation I get a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. Now I am a 'bottom line' sort of woman so, bottom line, are you going to help us or not?"

"I actually _can_ start a line of inquiry and see if any information can be obtained on this individual."

"Excellent." She makes a show of checking her watch. "When do you anticipate hearing something useful?"

"Well, considering the complexities of the issue, if I fast track it I should think we could start to see some progress in some four to six weeks."

"Four to six _weeks_?"

"We might hear something that soon."

Shepherd is sure the nails pressing into her palms are drawing blood by now, but she keeps this off her face and out of her tone. "I see. We'll be in touch, Assistant Rawlings."

The operator at the control station to their left, hearing the finality in her tone, cuts the circuit.

x

Shepherd turns to look up at Gibbs. "I'll get in touch with NCIS Scotland, have them find out what can be found _without_ State's aid. They can look into things quietly. I'd much rather have had official sanction, but I'll have to go ahead without it."

"I already have Special Agent MacKenna working that angle."

"Why am I not a bit surprised?"

"You value efficiency as much as I do."

"MTAC was a mistake," she admits, "I should have ridden out there."

"Do you think that would have made a difference?"

"No, but I'd have the satisfaction of giving him a good head slap."

xxx

Though the sun shines brightly through the skylight and the windows that overlook Washington, Tim McGee feels far from sunny. He had spent the night on his home computer, linked to this one at his desk, without much progress before it had come time to shower, shave and come in to try again. He would have preferred to have spent the night in the much more pleasant company of–.

He leans back from his computer monitor, his face alight. "Boss, come look at this!"

Gibbs crosses the space in three steps, the other agents crowding about a moment later. The excitement in McGee's voice promises a much needed break; they only hope the reality matches the promise.

"I was in Cavaluzzi's B.L. directory, there was ton of information to sort through, but I worked my way down to this sub-sub-sub-directory," he points to the screen, "and found this file labeled 'Read me'. I clicked on it and found this."

The screen contains a single line of text above a series of links, the blue underlined hypertext leading to three other files or programs, the names of each being quite mysterious. The text on top reads: 'In a mirror one cannot tell a friend from an enemy.'

"Okay, McGee, what do the files say?"

He's embarrassed. "Er, I don't know, they're encrypted."

Gibbs can hardly believe he has to tell the man to "_Unencrypt_ them!"

"Well, I–" he decides that rather than telling the man, he'll show him. He clicks on the first line of underlined blue text and a small dialogue box appears, demanding a password. "The time stamp on the files shows they were most recently accessed only four days ago – three days before Cavaluzzi's death. I'm thinking that this ties in with what you and Ducky found out from Albert Costello about Cavaluzzi having made a decision." Gibbs had told his team of the source of this information. "I thought that, with these being deep in his B.L. directory, that he would be putting the information somewhere where he knew it could be found. He'd want people to be able to read it, but still keep it secret until it had to be found. I thought that Ducky could–"

He says no more as Gibbs reaches for the phone.

x

Ten minutes later Donald Mallard is seated at Tim's desk, looking at the cryptic clue.

"Make any sense, Duck?" Gibbs asks.

"It does indeed." He reaches for the keyboard, but hesitates, looking up at the assembled agents. "Would you mind?"

Gibbs, mildly annoyed though respecting the man's discretion, averts his eyes from the keyboard, the others following his lead. A short set of keystrokes later there is a quite unpleasant sound from the machine's speaker. They do not have to recognize it to discern the tone.

"Oh dear." But just as they turn, Mallard brightens. "Of course, I forgot the mirror." A little more slowly, thinking about it, he inputs the same number of strokes. No one watches him work; none of them can miss the disappointing response from the speaker. "Hmmm, I thought writing it backward would be correct."

"You sure you're using the right password, Duck?" It had seemed a reasonable attempt; it isn't Ducky's fault that they'd assumed wrongly. He supposes he'll have to have McGee electronically break the code.

"Jethro, please," the man manages to sound as slighted as though Gibbs had asked him if he'd given the correct answer to 2 + 2. But he brightens again. "Of _course_! When one reads in a mirror, one must not only reverse the word but invert the letters themselves!"

A third time he touches the keys and the screen comes alive with several color pictures. Ducky chuckles; "Very clever, my Brother, I shall have to use that one."

"Just make sure it's not for your Autopsy reports."

The pictures that fill the screen are of naked young women, all of whom have one distinctive feature in common. All of them are enhanced with a variety of wings; some of birds, some of colorful butterflies, some angels, some even more fanciful figures. The fourth picture in the third column is Crystal Britizze, her large butterfly wings spread gracefully. On her face is the vacant stare shared by the other nude women.

x

Other images abound, all of which depict a large and complex laboratory, taken from a series of dizzying angles. The walls are clear, allowing unobstructed vision through several rooms. Each clear barrier is no more than six feet high, making the entire space one huge room broken up by compartments. There are numerous white coated men scattered at various distances, contrasting sharply with the imprisoned nude women. "How could he get away with taking these pictures?" Gibbs muses.

"It looks like the kind of shots he'd get while walking around talking on a cell phone."

"Not bad, Probie," DiNozzo says. "He couldn't aim, but he could get quite a few good shots without anyone realizing."

There are nearly a hundred pictures, not all of them pointing directly at anything in particular, but all of them valuable.

When they have seen all of the revealing photos, Ducky opens the next file, which contains exterior shots of a white building, two stories tall and, though seen from several angles, the shots never manage to include a street sign.

"Looks like a warehouse. McGee, you and Lee do some–"

"I can construct a map giving the layout of the laboratory from these photos."

"I'll look into some of these faces, find out who they are," DiNozzo says.

"I can use what is in the backgrounds from that warehouse to find it," Ziva volunteers.

"Whoa!"

This is DiNozzo's reaction to Ducky's opening of the next file. What appears on the screen resembles text, but nothing like they have ever seen before. It's a meaningless ménage of symbols; squares, three sided rectangles with the fourth side open in different directions on each, two sided 90 degree angles; greater and lesser signs, some upward and downward pointing carats. All that is discernable are supposed V's, A's and L's, but nearly half the emblems contain a small dot in the middle of the characters. Ducky scrolls down, the characters continue for quite a number of lines.

"McGee, can you break that code?"

"He does not have to, Jethro," Ducky declares, "I know what it says." At Gibbs' surprised look, he amends, "Rather I do not know what it says, but I can translate it, given about a half hour or so."


	9. Planning the Assault

Chapter Nine  
Planning the Assault

Thirty minutes after making this astounding promise, Ducky is back in the Squad Room, a single sheet of paper in his hand. Jimmy has joined him, unable to stay away from the curious situation. "A most fascinating document," he announces with particular satisfaction. "This is the first time I have been called upon to translate this particular code. It is, of course, familiar from long use but I have never enjoyed the occasion to–"

"Ducky."

"Ah, yes. Well, it describes the hidden vault beneath a warehouse in the Rock Creek region –"

"427 Upshur NE," Ziva announces. McGee had triangulated using visible landmarks; Ziva beats him to the report.

"Indeed. Well, if one enters and proceeds seventy feet inward from the front door, one comes to a particular pair of stacked crates. They are not crates, however. Pull the southwest corner of the supposed crates open, one will find it to be a door to a flight of stairs that lead downward to the laboratory."

"Just one entrance?"

"It would seem so."

x

Gibbs doesn't like it. "McGee, Lee, you finished with that map?"

"Just about."

"Well, let's see what you've got," he looks expectantly at the large plasma screen mounted on the wall between McGee's and DiNozzo's desks. The screen brightens to reveal a map composed of cubicles collected to the left side, the right given over to larger rooms outfitted with enough symbolism to distinguish them as an operating theater and supporting rooms. Added to these are a collection of theoretical spaces designated by red lines to indicate they're supposition only, no adequate view having been obtained.

"Where's that door from the warehouse?"

Using his mouse, McGee inscribes a rough circle midway along the long wall at the bottom of the screen, between the confinement cells on the left and larger facilities on the right.

"What do you think, boss? Three teams be enough to hit it?" Gibbs' hand comes up quickly, whacking the back of DiNozzo's head. "What was _that_ for?"

"One entrance in the middle of a facility, probably guarded by heavily armed personnel with unobstructed vision throughout? They'll pick us off like ducks in a shooting gallery."

"Air!" Ziva exclaims.

"What, you want some?" DiNozzo just cannot seem to leave well enough alone.

"No, Tony, I am fine. But if they are underground, they have to have vents to pump air in, several of them in fact, and as many out-take ducts."

"McGee?"

"One moment, boss." He checks the photos, and gradually circles are marked at various spots on the diagram.

"That'll do," Gibbs decides. The man can find the rest of them later; it's enough to know they are there. "How big are those vents?"

"I'm _guessing_ twenty five to thirty inches. There's only one picture with a man in it to provide scale."

"Big as vents go but still a tight squeeze, especially if you have to move fast." DiNozzo concludes. "Hope no one's claustrophobic." He catches Gibbs' glare. "Forget it, boss, you and I would get stuck like a cork, and the Probie wouldn't have a prayer."

"I can fit," Lee announces.

"Yes, you could; Ziva too." Gibbs decides.

"If 'Chelle can fit, so can I." All eyes turn to the much taller man standing close to Lee. "Come on, I'm an ectomorph."

"You've been watching too much Star Trek, Palmer."

Jimmy turns on DiNozzo, glad to have a target for his aggravation. "It means I'm tall and thin. I'm even thinner than 'Chelle," he turns his attention back to Gibbs, "and I'm used to squeezing into tight places."

Michelle looks away, wishing she could stop the blush that rises to her face.

"I mean–"

"Yeah, we get it, Palmer."

"And Mr. Palmer and I will certainly be needed, Jethro."

Gibbs looks at the man beside him, feeling the situation falling out of control, but Ducky gives him no chance to refuse.

"You are going to need experienced medical men to help deal with those women. We have no idea what their conditions are, but some of the pictures show surgery that at that unknown time was not yet healed. And given the choice between crawling through ducts and becoming a target in a shooting gallery, I was not named for _that_. I definitely prefer the former."

"All right, we're going to have to find some way of getting in there and getting those people out safely. McGee, you find any other entrances?"

"No, boss, but I did find something useful."

x

In the past few years, satellite technology has advanced to the point where almost anything on the planet is visible, at surprising resolution, to anyone with a computer. Companies like Google have made a specialty of making these images available to the public. With the input of an address, you can see anything at all from space. Real time images are not available to the public; that requires satellite time at prohibitive costs, but a static image is available to anyone for the price of a modem.

Thus, McGee is able to bring up, on the large plasma screen, the image of the building they seek, the photo having been taken an unknown amount of time ago. "Whenever this shot was taken, you can see this warehouse is one of a row."

"Kind of looks like the same layout where you and the Probette were held," DiNozzo notes and cannot help but voice the observation.

"Don't remind us." It's still a painful memory, which itself led to a nightmare incident neither agent wants to remember. Tim has been using medications designed to prevent the burns on his body from evolving into scars, and knows Michelle hasn't told anyone, not even Palmer, what physical and emotional scars she carries from the torturous day.

"The point," he continues, "is that there seem to be cameras installed at every corner of that building."

The resolution of the most greatly magnified image is poor, and taken from high above it is very indistinct. That is a problem with images generally available to the public; they lack the resolution of military surveillance hardware. However, there are few other explanations for the dark spots set on each side of each corner of the white building.

"If those are cameras," Gibbs concludes, "they have overlapping views of both sides."

"That looks like an HVAC unit on the roof," DiNozzo points out. "Looks like a big one; a lot of power to cool down a warehouse. Wonder why no one noticed?"

"You get what you pay for, DiNozzo. If someone wants to shell out big bucks to keep some crates cool, the AC company's not going to give a damn." Gibbs points to upright cylinders at either end of the roof. "That's what does matter, air outlet units, maybe with an exhaust fan."

"That is our way in," Ziva declares.

"The buildings across the street are about twenty feet higher. That's where I'd put sentries." He reaches for the phone, keys in a number and doesn't have long to wait. "Abs, that friend of yours from NASA,"

/You mean Ashton?/ The tech had helped them once before, using an orbital satellite to track a suspect's car.

"We need a way to see what's happening on a couple of roofs without being spotted."

/I just IM'd him an hour ago, he'll be glad to have his fingers on me twice today,/ her teasing tone flows with sensual innuendo, but he's too focused to fall for her this time. /He did that on the sly, using a satellite that was supposed to be down for repair; I don't know if he has another waiting./

"I'll take what I can get."

/When do you need it?/

He checks his watch, not about to launch an assault in broad daylight. "Six o'clock."

/I'll get right on him,/ she assures him in an equally saucy tone, but Gibbs hangs up on her.

x

"McGee, I want a detailed map of that place. Sort those images and put them on our pocket thingies. DiNozzo, hunt down the inspection records; I want to know when that place became more than a warehouse, and what the city thinks it is now. If you can't find out, tell me why you can't and who screwed up."

"On it, boss."

"Ziva, find out who installed that AC, get a map of the vents. Do they lead to the basement?" He has no doubt the lower level didn't resemble the lab it is now, but there will be records. Perhaps the company had been told the owners were going to be storing perishables, perhaps they'd been told nothing. Either way, he needs a map.

"Lee, lay in some climbing gear, couple hundred feet of rope, knotted at two foot intervals; also plain black jackets, hoods and gloves. Ducky, how are your climbing skills?"

"It will be just like my spelunking days in the caves of Wales. Did I ever tell you about the time–?"

"Tell me about it later. You go from one roof to another," he tells Ziva, Michelle, Ducky and Palmer, "drop down the exhaust shafts, work your way down to that lab and position yourselves where you can clear shots. You'll have to take out all those people you can hit, disrupt things so DiNozzo, McGee and I can make it in the front door and down the main stairs."

x

"Jethro, you're not planning on opening fire on these people, are you?" Ducky is appalled at the thought, seeing on Jimmy Palmer's face the same distress. It's one thing to infiltrate and cause a diversion, but this brings a whole new level for the medical men.

Gibbs turns to his old friend. "Not exactly; here's what you're going to do for us…."

As he outlines his plan, Ducky smiles in anticipation. He turns to the young man beside him. "Come along, Black Lung; we have work to do."  
Gibbs looks curiously at the departing men until Tony captures his attention. "Believe me, Boss, you're happier not knowing."

xx

"These launchers, not to be confused with guns," Ducky says, indicating the four, pistol-like devices in the case when they rendezvous in the Squad Room at sunset, "contain twenty darts in each clip, each with a 400 mg ampoule of chlorpromazine. It will take only moments to take effect, but will render the subject unconscious for about an hour."

"An hour will be plenty, Duck," Gibbs assures him.

"I obtained them from the Bethesda Psychiatry Department. They are distasteful, but there are times when they are necessary. I am normally not in favor of using drugs, but given the alternative of these or bullets, they are definitely the lesser of two distasteful evils."

"It'll at least keep them off your table."

"I prefer not to do autopsies upon people whose demise I have hastened."

"We'll try to keep casualties to a minimum, but after what they've done I'm not going to go easy on them."

Ducky remembers Crystal Britizze, bound face down upon her bed, screaming in agony, her withdrawal coupled with frenzied, drug-induced terrors. "Nor shall I."

xxx

Abby Sciuto stands with Jennifer Shepherd in the MTAC complex. On the screen before them is an energetic bearded man surrounded by electronic control panels.

"I'm getting a good image; you getting this, NCIS?"

"You are the man, Ashton!"

"Tango One, are you getting this?" Shepherd asks into her own wireless microphone. The image on the main screen switches to a wide, elevated shot – elevated to geosynchronous orbit. Now that the sun has set and the ambient temperature has begun to drop, two distinct points of red and yellow stand out on each of two roofs across the street from the target, a third is stationary on the roof of that building.

/We have it,/ Gibbs' calm voice sounds in her ear.

She wonders how it always it that the tenser the situation, the calmer he sounds. "We have to assume they are using night vision or infrared goggles. Have your teams approach with caution."

/Gee, why didn't I think of that?/

"This is no time for sarcasm, Tango One."

/Never a better time. Going to silent; Tango One out./

Shepherd looks to Abby beside her, closing her hand about her microphone. "There are times I just want to smack him."

"Why don't you?" she quips.

She recalls the 'debriefing' in the boxing ring; her best punches had barely fazed him. "I'm afraid he'd enjoy it."

xx

The agents have taken up a position on the end of the street, near the fire escape ladder of the last warehouse on the block. "What's the range of these darts?" Gibbs asks Ducky.

For once the man's answer is succinct. "They are accurate up to 100 feet, but I would advise no more than 80."

He measures the distance with his eyes. It's 160 feet to the end of the trio of warehouses. "All right, get up there – quietly."

xx

Having made their way as silently as possible up to the roof across the street from the target warehouse, DiNozzo and McGee close cautiously upon their prey. They're fortunate in that the buildings on this side of the street are office structures rather than warehouses; there are more barriers to hide behind.

David, however, has a more hazardous trek. She must traverse two buildings before reaching her prey, and with far less cover. She can only keep low, close to the rear of the buildings and hope the guard before her is fatigued enough not to expect a covert assault.

She can see him now, superimposed upon the night sky. He is holding a rifle cradled in his hands, and his attention is on the street below. Very slowly she breaks cover, approaching as stealthily as possible, goes down on one knee and takes careful aim.

x

"Tango Four to Tango One," Gibbs hears the woman's quiet voice in his ear. "Target dispatched."

"Tango Three, ditto," McGee reports.

"Tango Two, my man's having a nice long nap."

"Glad to hear it, Two. All of you get back here on the double. Remember, we don't know when check-in time is."

x

When the Assault Team, plus Ducky and Jimmy, are reunited by the ladder – though Ziva remains above and in contact by radio – he addresses the group. "When you're in position and ready to lay down covering fire, don't say a word. Ziva, you'll tap your radio once. Ducky, you hit yours twice; Lee, three times; Palmer, four. The three of us don't go in until we've received all of your signals. Pick your best targets. If we make it to the bottom door without triggering an alarm, I'll give a measured five taps. When you hear the fifth, start shooting."

Lee ascends the ladder, followed by Ducky and Jimmy, and the others move away as far from the corner as they can before taking up a position across the street, where they hope they are out of the field covered by the cameras aimed at the front and side of their target.

On the roof, the four make their ways to two high standing exhaust vents.

Jimmy pulls off his sneakers; Michelle, when she removes her high heeled shoes, looks down at his feet. He, at least, has socks.

He removes, as quietly as possible, the rotating mechanism that assists in drawing air upward through the exhaust shaft. Going down the air conditioning vents is out of the question; there is no way to get into them without interrupting the flow and giving themselves away. He lowers the long, knotted rope down the shaft, then reaches down to boost Michelle up and into the vent.

"Wait a second, will you?" she appeals from the top. Jimmy pauses, looking to the other vent at opposite corner, where Dr. Mallard and Ziva are preparing to lower themselves by their own rope into the air duct. Michelle closes her eyes, relaxing her muscles and begins slow, steady breaths.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she assures him, eyes still closed.

She doesn't seem afraid, or fighting down apprehension. He glances toward the others; they are already entering the shaft. When he looks to the petite woman beside himself, she seems relaxed but focused on much more than the job. "What are you doing?"

"I'm infusing myself."

"You're _whatting_ yourself?"

Her breath changes to a sigh, but she doesn't open her eyes. "Ever since what happened with Greg Martin and George Franklin, I do not go into a dangerous situation without appealing for help from the Goddess to lend me her power. Think of it as charging your batteries. It's not complicated, but I really _do_ have to concentrate."

Jimmy, watching the woman, wonders again if he is ever going to understand her, deciding again that he's simply going to have to accept that he never will.

In her mind Michelle pictures the light that surrounds her, the power of the Goddess she reveres, entering her body, suffusing it until she can actually feel it filling her. The divine force enters her until her cells feel as though they are bursting with raw power and energy; life filling her in a way she has tried – and failed – to explain numerous times. She knows Jimmy will never get it. That does not make it less real, however, certainly not for her.

x

When the woman before him opens her eyes, she seems different to him in a way he cannot define. Certainly she is straighter, more visibly confident. Perhaps, he tells himself, she believes she is stronger and so she is. In whatever way she's different, she is no longer apprehensive.

"I wish I could do that."

"Learn the path to the Light," she offers; an old offer she wishes he would take.

"I think we'd better learn the path to the basement before Agent Gibbs wants to know if we're in position and we're still up here."

She checks the tranquilizer gun secured firmly to her hip. "'Lay on, Macduff'."

He helps her into the vent. "'And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough.'"


	10. Disaster

Chapter Ten  
Disaster

It's a tight squeeze for both teams; the shafts are hardly wider than their bodies. They must ease themselves cautiously down the knotted ropes, trying not to touch the sides of the metal shafts. One kick, one misstep and their presence could be announced throughout the entire building. It's for this reason that shoes and other hard objects, with the exception of tranquilizer guns and Sigs, have been left on the roof. When they reach their assigned positions and are ready for Gibbs, DiNozzo and McGee to assault the main entrance, they must lay down a barrage of non-deadly fire. They cannot indiscriminately kill to disrupt their enemies, but disrupt them they must or the three larger agents will walk into a deadly crossfire.

When Michelle reaches the bottom she learns a new appreciation for the phrase 'tight squeeze'. The shaft changes from vertical to horizontal with plenty of room for air to flow, not much for human bodies. "Great, we should have gone down head first," she whispers.

"I'm not sure we could do that," Jimmy answers from above her, keeping his own voice cautiously low. Any loud noise would be transmitted to their enemies and prove disastrous. "Can you get through?"

She crouches down as low as the shaft will allow. The space she must force her body into is thirty inches square, with no room to maneuver to lie down so she can crawl in. "Barely, but I'm probably going to lose something." She tries to twist her body about in the too small space, trying to keep her pained grunts to herself.

"You mean you don't have a spell to get through this?"

She doesn't care for his wry amusement. "You mean like turning myself into a bunny? No, I do _not_."

"I've always thought of you more as a pussy –" he doesn't need to see the glare she sends up the rope, "– cat."

"You are so lucky I can't reach you."

"Think small."

"'Think small'. The only thing that makes it worth the effort is that _you_ are going to get stuck like a cork."

"I'm double jointed."

"_Hmmph_, wish I were." She squeezes a bit further, feeling the shaft try to take an inch of flesh off her left shoulder and wishing she could use more though louder force.

"I always thought you were." His whispered tone leaves her no doubt as to where he'd gotten that idea.

"I could use being a contortionist right now."

"I always thought you were," he repeats as softly.

"What?"

"A cun–."

"_Shut up_!"

x

It is only a greater annoyance to her to look back to the junction and see Jimmy manage to scrunch his body down until he is seated at the base of the shaft, his knees up to his shoulders, his arms wrapped about his legs and his head tucked low, allowing him to fall to his left into the horizontal vent and then unfold his body and crawl on his stomach after her. "Bastard," she whispers without any heat. She hadn't thought of trying the same trick, realizing she might have made it without wrenching anything.

"You teach me some of that Wicca magic, I'll teach you how to fold yourself up."

"Every time I do try to curl myself up, you unfold me."

xx

It doesn't take more than a few feet of crawling to reach the first lighted grill. Looking through the latticework, she's gratified that the crisscrossing metal provides sufficiently large diamond shapes through which to aim and shoot. She'd feared that, despite the few views they had of the ductwork, she might have encountered a covering that was useless in staging the assault they planned. Looking through, she can see numerous clear walled cells, each of which contain a naked, winged woman.

"What do you see?" Jimmy whispers from beyond her bare feet, his words so low she can barely hear them.

"Two dozen clear cubicles, six to a row; with sixteen women in them. They have all sorts of wings. Most are laying face down, can't sleep any other way. There are … fifteen men scattered about the place, lots of white coats. They probably like playing 'doctor' with those poor women. The far side of the room is bigger rooms, some clear, the others at the end enclosed. I'm not sure, looks like sheetrock. No ceiling covers anywhere, but I only have three clear shots down corridors and maybe in the bigger rooms if I can clear the six foot walls."

"No, I have those shots; you're further along. I can't climb on top of you."

"Why should today be any different?" she mutters, giving up the vantage point and moving on.

xx

Gibbs, DiNozzo and McGee wait in an alley across the street from the warehouse, continuing to inspect the area. There are two cameras on each corner of the building, facing each direction, the four closest covering the front and sides. Two of these can be discounted; they intend a frontal assault on the main door. The information from Cavaluzzi's secret files details the location of the hidden 'door' in relation to the front door; there'll be no time for uncertainty.

Gibbs and DiNozzo are armed with rifles; Gibbs with his weapon of choice, a Marine M40 A1 Sniper Rifle, DiNozzo with a similar weapon. Their targets, to be hit simultaneously, are the cameras pointing up and down the street to cover the entrance. When the fourth signal comes through, they are ready. Gibbs and DiNozzo take careful aim on their targets; McGee has his Sig in one hand, cell phone in the other.

"Ready?" Gibbs asks; his voice calm and as steady as the rifle in his hands.

"Got it," DiNozzo confirms.

McGee's phone is linked to all the others; he will signal the simultaneous assault to all four agents in the basement laboratory. He taps the unit in a measured beat – four – three – two – one – _fire_.

x

Thunder echoes up and down the street as both cameras explode in a cloud of debris and the three agents charge the door. They know that, down below, the others have launched a hail of sedative darts designed to take out as many of the 'enemy' as possible while causing maximum confusion, spreading chaos throughout the complex.

The three men waste no time at the door; Gibbs notes the rust allowed to accumulate on the lock before McGee's bullets obliterate it. Gibbs throws the main door open and they run for the indicated stack of crates, the only pair seventy feet directly in from the main entrance. The door is cleverly camouflaged, but not well enough against Cavaluzzi's information. DiNozzo throws the door open, McGee reaching past with his smaller weapon to cover the dark staircase. From down below they can hear urgent shouting, confused orders and running feet forming a cacophony of chaos.

"Go!" Gibbs orders. DiNozzo takes the lead, Gibbs next and McGee bringing up the rear, his attention and gun directed back up the stairs, ready to deal with any attack from behind. They reach the foot of the stairs in seconds and DiNozzo kicks the inner door, making it fly open as the three agents charge into the mêlée, taking up covering positions. Gibbs' shout of command cuts through the chamber.

Nothing so convinces an unarmed man, already under attack from unseen forces all about him, to surrender as the sight of two high powered rifles and one steady handgun in the hands of black clad men. There are four men on the ground, scattered throughout the complex; the other ten know panes of glass are no barrier to the weapons trained upon them.

"Face down on the floor, hands on your heads!" Gibbs barks, seeing that their opponents have no stomach for the deadly odds. Seconds later, throughout the huge complex, air duct grills crash to the floor, and the four snipers make their way down as best they can. The three at the door can't spare the attention to help. In less than a minute, however, handcuffs are secured about the wrists of white coated men, even as Ducky and Jimmy, together with Michelle, turn their attentions to the cubicles to the left and the variously winged women, none of whom had reacted to the noise and chaos.

x

"DiNozzo, McGee, check those back rooms." Gibbs doesn't like the fact that there are three rooms to the far right that are enclosed by actual walls rather than panes of glass. "Ziva, cover them."

The agents take up positions at two of the doors, David standing a few feet off, her gun ready. McGee, ready for danger, opens the first door to reveal an empty office. He turns to nod to DiNozzo and David; DiNozzo reaches for the knob on the second door.

The door explodes outward, knocking him to the side and a blue suited man bursts out, his gun firing wildly.

Michelle, standing with Ducky and Jimmy by the cubicles containing the drugged women, is struck in her face by a splash of red blood bursting from Jimmy's throat as he's knocked backward off his feet!

"_JIMMY_!" she shrieks, horrified by the blood erupting from his neck! Gibbs, Tony, Tim and Ziva don't glance back; the scream tells them all they need as they unleash a barrage of bullets. The man is caught in the crossfire; blood explodes from his body as the agents empty their guns into him. Michelle rushes to her knees beside Jimmy, Ducky on his other side as he clings to his neck, blood gushing between his fingers.

x

"It's hit the jugular vein!" Ducky exclaims as he rips his jacket off, pulls Jimmy's hand away from his neck and presses the wadded black material hard against the wound. The bullet has gone through the left side of his neck and Ducky tries to cover both wounds while pressing laterally on Jimmy's neck as the young man lies gasping, writhing in pain. They barely note the other agents closing about them; Tony comes down beside Ducky, adding his strength to his.

"Jimmy, _hold on_!" Michelle cries, blood dripping from her face. She clutches his bloody hand as Ducky works to save his companion. Unrestrained tears of panic flow down her cheeks as her world compresses into the man writhing before her. They can hear Gibbs on his cell phone, calling for Navy medical help while Tim calls civilian 911, it's now a race to see who can arrive first. The blood soaks the black jacket, turning it slick with gore. "Jimmy, _please_! _You have to hang on_!"

Jimmy slows, his movements becoming vague.

Ducky glances up. There's a full medical facility just yards away, through several transparent walls, but he must stop the flow of blood before they may move the man; otherwise he might bleed to death before they could carry him to a table.

x

Michelle, nearly out of her mind with terror, feels her world slip away as voices become unclear. She sees Ziva on Jimmy's other side, next to Ducky; her words "his pulse is too wild," come from a thousand miles away. Reality fades, urgent voices become distant as time and space seem to warp. Without clear thought she holds Jimmy's hands in her left but with her right hand she reaches for the center of his chest. His heart pounds too quickly.

Nothing around her is real anymore, just the raging heart under her hand, the left hand in hers cool with shock but slick with warm blood. The splashed blood is warm upon her face; she has to blink a drop away, unable to reach it.

Nothing is real but Jimmy writhing in agony on the floor, the two men beside him struggling to save his life.

'Goddess – _please_,' she implores silently, 'help me!'

From that Wiccan-trained place deep within her that she has never successfully explained she calls upon the healing power so familiar to her, feels it flow within her body. Her special talent had always been healing, relief of pain and everything that had to do with life. Now she must use everything she knows, everything she is, to save Jimmy.

She feels the power move down her arms into her hands, and they begin to tingle. She can feel in her hands the essence of the Goddess, her life force riding the current, channeling though her. She passes it on.

Though unable to articulate how it happens, she knows how to channel the strength within her and make it do what she needs it to. Right now, she only knows she must let it flow out of her and into him. Denying fear, shutting out grief, she concentrates only on pushing her healing power, her life, her essence, into him.

x

Jimmy's anguished movements slow and stop. For a moment Ducky's heart leaps into his throat until he sees that the young man is still breathing. Michelle is kneeling on his other side, head bowed, eyes closed, breathing with increasing sharpness; intense concentration on her face. Other than her breathing she's motionless, her concentration locked on Jimmy. His agonized writhing has stopped. Michelle's body might well be a statue's, utterly focused as she is on something he cannot see. Ducky has seen similar things in his long travels, isn't sure what is happening as he holds the jacket shoved against Jimmy's neck, only that something is.

x

Michelle continues to force her strength from her body, down her arms into her hands and then into Jimmy's body, to concentrate on the power and her prayers. She calls upon her Patron Goddess, upon all the Gods and Goddesses she knows, implores strength and the power to continue. From a million miles away she hears Ziva's words: "His pulse is slowing, but it's stronger." There is wonder in those words.

She continues, trying to find more strength, more life to pump into her beloved. She feels herself weakening, her strength depleting as she forces more of herself down and away, out of herself and into him. She can feel herself growing weaker. He must live, he must have _life_! He must have _her_ life, her strength. She knows only that she must support him until Ducky can get the bleeding stopped, can get him onto an operating table, save his life! She presses more and more of her life into him, calling upon all her training, forcing the spiritual force from herself, the life from her body into his, holding nothing back.

Her breath grows ever sharper as she continues to force more of herself, of her life, out through her hands into Jimmy, into the man who is her life. The world is spinning, tipping sickeningly out of control. She pants, growing dizzy but cannot stop, will not stop, dragging everything she has out of herself, concentrating only on pushing it into Jimmy.

Her body trembles. She's growing weak, tired. It grows harder to push, harder to find the strength within her for more. But she must find the strength – Jimmy _needs_ it! She has to do more! But she can feel the life fading, leaving her with almost nothing but the need to continue. She has to do more!

"Special – Agent – Gibbs!" she pants.

"I'm here," his voice is an inch away from her.

"Touch me! _Please_ touch me," it takes the last of her strength to gasp, "and whatever happens, _don't_ let go!"

His hand touches the back of hers, over Jimmy's heart and instantly she goes from draining herself to channeling him!

x

Gibbs hears Michelle gasp sharply the instant he lays his hand upon hers and Jimmy's body arches up upon the floor, his gasp sharper as his eyes open wide and Gibbs is sure his own eyes reflect his amazement. He doesn't know what he's feeling, can't put it into words. If it were a wound in his hand he would be gushing blood, yet his hand is whole and unhurt. But as the woman breathes heavily, panting for air, something is leaving him in a floodtide. Something he cannot name is being pulled from him and into …

x

Jimmy's eyes turn and lock on Michelle kneeling beside him, shoulders slumped and breath rasping so hard her chest heaves from the effort. He knows what's happening – and he can't allow it. "'Chelle!" It's agony to whisper, the pressure of the two men's hands overwhelming, but he must. "Stop it! _Don't_!"

She's weaker, seeming to collapse inward, fading away. Her body grows limp even as she fights to continue.

"Gibbs! Stop her! Don't _let_ her!"

"Shut up!" he commands.

"You – don't – under –"

"The bleeding is stopped." Ducky says from his other side, easing the pressure. There is a wonder in his voice that Jimmy cannot consider for, at that moment, Michelle sighs and her hands slip away as she falls to the side.

Gibbs grabs her, eases her to the floor, placing her on her back.

"Duck, she's barely breathing!"

x

Relief vanishes as Ducky releases the blood soaked jacket to Tony, coming around to the motionless woman as Jimmy, cautious about moving, tries to turn to her. Tony holds the gory jacket to his neck, helps him turn. He understands nothing of this but knows he has to help Palmer reach her without his wound reopening, so he supports him as much as he can.

"'Chelle?" She doesn't answer, doesn't move.

"Ducky!" Gibbs looks to his friend, who kneels above her head. Ziva, having hurried around to Gibbs' side, is now checking _her_ pulse, nodding to the doctor.

"'_Chelle_!" Jimmy reaches for her, panicked tears blinding him as he clutches her motionless body.

"I'm _sorry_, Jethro, I have no answers," Ducky spreads his hands helplessly. If she were not breathing he would do CPR, any medical aid, but… "Timothy, get into that operating theater, try to find some epinephrine, adrenaline, any stimulant!"

x

Jimmy wants to scream. He knows what's wrong, but how to tell them what she has done when he doesn't know how to help her either? She has given herself, her _life_.

"'Chelle! _Please_!" His voice is choked as tears wash down his face. DiNozzo supports him even as he holds the crumpled jacket to his throat, an agony and a distraction, but he can't think of this!

He pleads because he doesn't know what else to do. "You can't die. You _can't_!" He takes her limp hand in his, not knowing what she did or how to undo it. "'Chelle! '_Chelle_! Don't _leave_ me! _Please_ don't leave!" He can barely breathe; tears steal his voice, the world blurred by misery he cannot wipe away. He can't feel the pain of his own wound under DiNozzo's hands any longer; it's buried under the torment that rips his soul to shreds.

"It's not supposed to _be_ like this! You and I, 'Chelle, we – we're gonna be married. We're gonna have _children_! I – I'm going to get you that house – the one in the country – the one you always wanted. We – we were going – we're going to be happy! 'Chelle? '_Chelle_? Don't _go_! _Please_ don't go!"

Slowly, very slowly, her eyes drift halfway open, but her vision is unfocused. "Jimmy…" her weak whisper is barely a breath. "I … lov …"

"_NO_! No, we're gonna get _married_! Right away if you want. No more waiting!"

"Jim – my?"

"We're gonna have _children_ – all we can handle, and they're –!"

"Sounds … won … der …"

Her whisper ends in a long, quiet sigh and her eyes slowly drift closed.

The rising sound of approaching sirens is drowned out by his weeping.


	11. Goodbye Michelle

Epilogue

The rhythmic, high pitched beeping beside his head brings Jimmy Palmer out of sleep, and as he resentfully forces his eyes open his vision is filled only with an indistinct haze of white. His neck hurts and he moves vaguely, reaching out. A pinch on his left arm stops his questing movements. He sees an indistinct dark blur arise on his right and then a familiar piece of thin light metal is placed into his hand. He opens his glasses, pulls them onto his face. The world resolves into a white room, fluorescent lighting, a monitor and IV on his left. It was the needle taped into his arm that had pinched. To his right stands a grim Ducky Mallard.

"Doctor?"

"How do you feel, my boy?"

"Who cares? How's 'Chelle?"

The grievous sympathy etched into the man's expressive eyes answers the question far better than words.

"I am so sorry, my boy. It has been four days. Her funeral was yesterday."

x

Jimmy's heart shatters into a billion shards. Tears sting his eyes, but he wants to hear what the man has to say.

"She was buried in Arlington, full Honors. She was awarded, posthumously, the NCIS Medal for Conspicuous Gallantry. They were … they were going to bury it with her but I thought you would prefer to have it."

"Doctor?" He can barely keep his voice level, to keep the tears from stealing his words. "What happened?"

Ducky has had four days to frame an answer to this. He still doesn't have one. "There is an indefinable spark to this thing we call 'life'. I do not know how she did it, but in the end she cared far more about _your_ life than she did her own. I have heard of people 'giving up their lives for those they love', but this is the first time I have witnessed it."

"She didn't have to do it. There _had_ to have been another way."

"She did not believe there was."

The pain is replaced by agony. "I can't go on without her." He closes his eyes, unable to endure it. They buried her? He wasn't even there to say 'goodbye'. How can he live? To live without Michelle? _No_! "I won't! I want to be _with_ her. I wish I were–"

"You will do no such thing, James Palmer!" Mallard's voice is harder than he has ever heard it. When he opens his eyes the other man's are like granite orbs. "Michelle Lee gave up her life so you may live, and you will _honor_ that sacrifice all the days of your life to come!"

Jimmy lies back, watching the IV drip clear liquid into his arm. The drops seem to count the seconds … the eternal seconds … the seconds of the rest of his life without Michelle.

Drugged sleep and misery claim him and he gives in to oblivion, wishing it could be the final sleep of death….


	12. Epilogue

Epilogue 2

The rhythmic, high pitched beeping beside his head brings Jimmy Palmer out of sleep, and as he resentfully forces his eyes open his vision is filled only with an indistinct haze of white. His neck hurts and he moves vaguely, reaching out. A pinch on his left arm stops his questing movements. He sees an indistinct dark blur on his right and then a familiar piece of thin light metal is placed into his hand. He opens his glasses, pulling them onto his face, the world resolving into a white room, fluorescent lighting, a monitor and IV on his left. It was the needle taped into his arm that had pinched. To his right stands Ducky Mallard.

"How do you feel, my boy? When we came in, I felt it best to wake you. Before you answer, yesterday's surgery was successful. You are going to be fine. You'll be here for a while, but you should make a complete recovery."

Jimmy looks about the room. Other people are approaching from his left: Gibbs, Director Shepherd, Tony, Ziva, Tim, Abby, O'Mallory. He turns away from Mallard, unable to bear it. There are no words that can be said, nothing that will matter.

After a moment, Ducky tries again. "We rescued 16 young ladies. After they recover, they will receive surgery to remove their wings."

"Great," he mutters, not having the spirit for more.

Ducky tries yet again to reach his friend. "The evidence we found was enough to convince the Scottish authorities to act. They liberated five young ladies who will also receive treatment."

"Wonderful," he mutters dismally. "I'm glad for them. I guess _someone_ can have a happy ending."

"Mr. Palmer…?"

"Please, doctor, just everyone leave me alone." For the rest of his life he will be alone, so he supposes he'd better get used to it. He senses Mallard withdrawing, but then his attention is yanked back by a familiar voice to his right.

"Don't worry, Doctor Mallard, I'll give him all the care he can handle."

He turns so quickly pain rips through his neck, but he doesn't care.

"'_CHELLE_!" He sits up so abruptly that Ducky reaches out to restrain him. His cry is equal parts astonishment and ecstasy as he stares in disbelief at the petite woman.

x

"Well, who else would I be?" she quips, startled at his frantic cry.

"You're _DEAD_!" The world is tipping out of control, threatening to dump him off.

Michelle giggles. "Hardly. I'm perfectly fine."

"If I may…" Ducky interjects firmly, concerned that Jimmy is going to hurt himself. "Yesterday the bullet nicked your left jugular vein producing an impressive amount of blood but it was a nick only. Agent Lee … well, I'm not entirely sure _what_ she did–"

"Trade secret, Doctor," she tells him with an inscrutable smile.

He decides to accept it. "Anyway, it slowed and steadied your heart, reduced your blood pressure and gave you an infusion of strength that kept you going until pressure on the wound allowed the vein to clot. You should have been barely able to move, let alone to risk turning over; I look forward to finding out why that didn't happen. We got you to Bethesda and into surgery in plenty of time. It did, however, drain Miss Lee."

"I saw you _die_!" he protests, trying to wrap his brain around this new reality.

"Ding-dong, you saw me pass out from exhaustion," she corrects him with a loving smile. "I had to sleep. I was so drained I slept most of the day while you were in surgery – sorry about that – but when I woke up I was fine." She takes his hand. "But I did hear what you said. It was beautiful, even if I was too exhausted to answer you."

Jimmy, seeing Mother O'Mallory with the others at the foot of the bed, clutches Michelle's hands in his. "'Chelle, let's get married!"

"Jimmy, we _are_ getting married."

"No, now, _right_ now! I don't want to wait another second! I don't want to run the risk of ever losing you again!"

x

Michelle looks about at her friends, not knowing what to say and not liking it. This is too unexpected, too sudden, but she doesn't want to agitate him either. She turns back to Jimmy. "No. You're sweet to offer and I _am_ going to take you up on it someday, but not until you're well and on your feet. Thank you, but we're going to do this right."

"As soon as possible."

Her eyes are filled with all her love. "Yes, dear."

_Fin_

Next Episode: Salarium. Why would someone murder a Navy Commander on the eve of his retirement? Did the Petty Officer accompanying him see something he shouldn't? How do two murders take place in full view of dozens of witnesses without anyone seeing or hearing anything?


End file.
